I have been writing

in between all the other things which must be done in my life. There always seem to be too many of them.
Today I am prowling off to the Showgrounds where I will do duty as a Steward and help to judge and display the handknitting. It is one of the smaller classes in the art and craft section but still an important one.
I know that, when we have put the display together, I will think that so many people will pass through and look at it all and say (hopefully) nice things. Very few of them will think of the amount of work involved or how some of us will give up another day to demonstrate our crafts.
It is the same with any exhibition. There is an enormous amount of planning beforehand. There is a lot of volunteer time involved so that others can enjoy themselves.
I do it because it may encourage someone else to take up knitting or crochet or some other craft. It may encourage them to learn the craft or a new skill within the craft. It may encourage them to join a group.
And that group may make all the difference to them. One person coming to help is very quiet but she is a good worker and, she says, she enjoys helping. She lost her son several years ago having already lost her husband - both in tragic accidents. Someone invited her to help. "We need you."
It made the difference between coping and not coping for her. She did not want to come but she was encouraged and the friend who invited her made sure we all knew what she needed. Some people need mental health care. Others need to be told they are needed.

Nicola Morgan and I

were discussing the whereabouts of her virtual cat last night. He has a habit of disappearing at times. He visits me on occasion.
There is a good reason for that. He comes in summer. It allows him to avoid winter in Edinburgh. He gets virtual salmon for Christmas Day lunch - and, being a Scots cat, insists on the same thing for Hogmanay as well.
This time I could guess where he had gone. He had prowled off to the yurt at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and was, no doubt, helping himself to titbits of salmon in the author area. (He fancies himself as an author.)
The Whirlwind likes Spike. She says the best part of Nicola's book "Wasted" is the part with Spike in it but what, she wanted to know, does Spike eat for breakfast.
       "Virtual milk and cat biscuits," I said.
She looked at me in disgust.
       "That shows no imagination at all!"
We went on to consider other possibilities. Mouse flavoured cereal perhaps?
The Whirlwind tells me that breakfast at school (she boards during the week) shows no imagination either. There is cereal or porridge and wholemeal toast and a piece of fruit. There is Vegemite (similar to Marmite), jam or marmalade to go on the toast. It is apparently the same each weekday. On the rare occasions she has stayed at school for the weekend breakfast is later and might include pancakes or boiled eggs. It is probably all very healthy and designed to keep active girls content until the next meal.
At least they eat breakfast.
I eat breakfast too. I can, if necessary, go without other meals but I need breakfast. What is more I need breakfast sitting at a table. I do not want to drink some artificially flavoured mix from a sealed tetra-pack on my way to work. That is not breakfast.
I do not want a bacon and eggs type breakfast but I do want porridge or cereal or toast. The day does not seem right without breakfast.
It would be a sort of virtual milk and biscuits day.

I have woken to the news that

Neil Armstrong has died. He was not particularly old - 82 is not a really great age anymore. The Senior Cat will, all being well, have a 90th birthday next February. I know people who are over 100 years old.
It makes me wonder about the toll of space travel on the human body. It must be very great. Astronauts apparently have to be incredibly fit. The Australian state I live in has a homegrown astronaut. He went to the same school as my nephews and they have, briefly, met him. They were rather young then and rather overwhelmed and had little to say about the experience. One of the nephews did mention the fitness issue. There were small boys getting "astronaut fit" all over the playground after the visit.
I can remember trying to explain to my nephews how I was at teacher training college when that moonwalk occurred. College stopped. Staff and students gathered around television sets brought in for the occasion. It was all in grainy black and white of course. The reception, coming in via a series of relay stations, was very poor. It all seemed more than a little unreal.
Our homegrown astronaut was probably watching the same pictures at school. I doubt very much work was being done anywhere that day. I know friends in other parts of the world were sitting up and watching when they would normally have been sleeping.
My nephews found all of this rather extraordinary. They have grown up in the age of regular NASA and Russian flights. A launch is nothing remarkable in their book.
Space flights no longer cause the same intense interest unless something goes tragically wrong. Most of us know very little about the international space station. We have even less idea how any of it works. The extraordinary Mars landing was barely reported here. I find that sad.
I wonder what Neil Armstrong thought when, on his return to earth, he could stand outside at night and stare up at the moon. "I've been there and I walked on that" would hardly begin to describe the journey.  Did the memory stay sharp in his mind or did it fade? Had the moon lost its mystery for him - or had it become a greater mystery than before? I hope it was a greater mystery.

So another great sporting hero

has gone to zero - or has he?
I was going to write about something quite different this morning. I try to do bookish things on Saturdays but there is something that needs to be said this morning.
Yesterday Lance Armstrong, seven times winner of the Tour de France, announced he was giving up his fight against drug doping charges. He said something about "enough is enough" and other people started to say "he's guilty". 
Perhaps he is. Perhaps he isn't. I don't know. I am not terribly interested in whether any one individual in sport takes drugs or not. I suspect that almost everyone who reaches the top of the field in their chosen sport does take performance enhancing drugs. Some get caught. Some don't.
Sport has almost certainly reached a level of achievement where it is only possible to be "the best" with some sort of external assistance. People do not do it unaided. They no longer run barefoot. It's a fact of life. All the anti-doping authorities in the world are not going to change that.
I once read a complaint somewhere that Roger Bannister only achieved his "four minute mile" because he had assistance from the wind. He did? I thought he was running around an oval so half the time he would surely have been facing into the wind. Maybe I am wrong but the article did tell me one thing. People will believe what they want to believe - and they will rarely believe the best of anyone, especially anyone who achieves more than they have when they have set out to achieve the same thing.
I heard Bannister interviewed recently and he spoke about his achievement as a joint achievement. There was a good deal of planning which went into that first mile. It is considered a "slow" mile now but there had been long discussions beforehand about how it might be achieved.
The pressure to win in sport now is immense. It is not even just the top athletes who are required to do extraordinary things. Any schoolchild now knows that participating is less important than winning. Schools can try to tell them otherwise but the message is out there in all sorts of other ways. Even when parents tell them "it does not matter" they know that, really, it does matter. They are not "the best" and being "the best" is all that matters. If you need to take performance enhancing drugs you will do it, despite what they might do to your long term health. You will do it and hope you do not get caught. Indeed the real sin is not taking them but being caught, letting the team down, embarrassing your country. It's like being a traitor.
Is it any wonder that I loathe that sort of sport? I am tired of the adulation given drug enhanced achievements. I am tired of the vast amounts of money poured into finding and producing those things.
If we spent as much money on finding cures for that range of diseases we call "cancer" then we would all be better off. I think Lance Armstrong might agree with that.

There was an Antarctic

blast yesterday. The day before had not been wonderful but yesterday morning I was woken by the flashing lights, rumbles and bangs of a thunderstorm. It was dramatic but fortunately short lived. What followed was rain and hail and wind - all straight up from the Antarctic.
There is no land mass between my little part of the world and the Antarctic, just the ocean. Brrrr.
My family spent four years living on an island just south of the mainland. My father was the principal of a very large school there. It took in all the children from the western half and centre of the island. The school itself was situated in the centre of the island on a plateau where there was no protection at all from the wind - and the wind came straight across the southern ocean from the Antarctic.
When my mother or I put the washing on the line we grew to expect that it would hang horizontally rather than vertically. The trees grew the same way. They were stunted spindly trees. If you wanted to grow anything else you had to protect it from the wind.
Going to the "general store", the only shop, meant bending into the wind. It was difficult to pedal my tricycle into the wind but, coming home with the shopping in the little tray on the back, was easy. The wind did most of the work. I just had to be careful that none of the shopping got blown away.
My brother and I lost countless numbers of kites made from newspaper and sticks. The strings kept breaking in the wind. If other toys were not kept inside they would blow around the garden and cause damage as well as be damaged.
My father kept the firewood in a corner of the yard, under a wooden structure made the previous owner - or perhaps the boys in the school had made it for him. We woke one morning to find the structure had collapsed in the wind. My father and two of the teachers spent a Saturday morning constructing something much sturdier.
The house itself was made fibro-plaster board. It was standard Public Buildings Department issue, the sort provided to all teachers who had housing supplied.  It would shake and rattle in the wind. We wondered it did not lift from the flimsy wooden posts it stood on and transport us like Dorothy.
It might have except that we were already in Oz.

Every morning one of my acquaintances

takes a bucket and a brush and heads off to the railway station at the back of his home. Once there he cleans off any graffiti which has appeared overnight and clears up any rubbish left lying around.
He has been doing this before dawn almost every day for the past twenty years. If he is away then another neighbour does the job for him.
The railway station, which is heritage listed, is neat and tidy and clean. It is all because of the efforts of this man and a small band of gardeners who go in once a week and keep "Nellie's Garden" tidy.
"Nellie" was the wife of one of the station masters - in the days when the station had such a person. They lived on the property and, while her husband dealt with trains and switches and parcels and tickets, Nellie gardened.  In their off-duty time they rode a motor bike - Nellie sat behind. There is a mural depicting them on the wall of the old switch "box". Their neighbour keeps all that clean and free of graffiti too.
The result is that, although the car park area still gets used for the almost inevitable drug deals, the station itself is remarkably free of crime. There have been just three serious incidents there in the last twenty years - things that even the neighbours could not have prevented with their vigilance.
It is the railway station I use. I would not use it at night but then I would not use any public transport at night. It is, sadly, no longer safe to do that. It is however much safer to use the station during the day largely because of the efforts of one man. No, he is not around during the day but other people are. They will use the station because it is clean.
Once none of this would have been necessary. There would have been a station master living on the property. The train to Melbourne actually used to stop there and pick up passengers and parcels. Now it is just infrequent suburban trains as the long goods trains roar through without stopping.
Soon our line will be closed for months. They are building an underpass on a part closer to the city. This is not for our benefit. It has something to do with the needs of the long goods trains - which will be getting even longer.
My acquaintance will continue to maintain the station though. He will do it as long as he can.
And when he stops? Will someone take over?

We had a small visitor

yesterday...one of those just old enough to be in need of earnest entertainment while the adults talk.
Granny and I stayed inside with the young man while the old men disappeared to the shed to find timber to mend something. The shed is not safe for small visitors.
All she had for him to play with was the bunch of car and house keys. He was bored with the keys. Five or six months ago they might have been enough but now he wants more.
      "He's got something in the car but it's broken - some horrible plastic thing."
      "Hold on, I'll get the blocks. He can play with those."
      "Blocks?"
      "Yes. He will like those."
I brought out the large box of wooden blocks that we keep for just such occasions and opened it. I took out the archway block and put it on the table and we drove the keys through as if they were a car.
A few minutes later he was on the floor. There were blocks on the floor too, all over the floor. He was pushing them around, piling one on another and pushing it off again. He was standing them upright and pushing them over. He was pushing the pillars through the archway and making noises to himself.
Blocks were banged together and banged against the box. They climbed the chair his grandmother was sitting on. 
He was perfectly content for nearly half an hour. I made tea for the adults. He was not interested in milk or a biscuit. He was busy.
His grandfather, a good carpenter, was watching by then.
       "All it takes is a bit of wood," he said."
I was surprised he had not thought of it before. My father has made many sets.  We had a set. All his grandchildren had a set - and now his great-grandchildren. The blocks are castles, houses, garages, princesses, dragons, fire engines, a garden, the beach, a cricket game, a boat and a plane - complete with passengers.
Yes, all it takes is a bit of wood. All children should have a bit of wood.