I was on a work trip back in the 80s that took me to one of the northern islands of Vanuatu. Our plane landed on a football field, that’s how remote our destination was. After we set up camp, someone said they’d heard there was a teacher from New Zealand in the nearby village. Well I’m a New Zealander too, so off I went to meet her. Within the first few minutes we had worked out that not only were we originally from the same small town… she was my older brother’s first girlfriend.

But actually because NZ has a small population and we all travel a lot, it’s not as mad a coincidence as all that. It sometimes feels like we are all just a couple of degrees of separation from each other. “Oh you’re from Oamaru? Do you know XY?” “Not really, but one of my cousins works for his sister, ZY.”

The thing is though, I might want to sell before I die. I’ve got a good 20 years in me!

I kind of like it too. When I was 12 my parents asked what colour I wanted my bedroom painted. “Purple.” They painted it off-white. I’m over 70 now and still have never had a purple room. My kitchen is pale grey ffs.

Off to look at paint charts …

These two:

One is hot, one is mild. It’s a lottery whether I can remember the right word in Hungarian when I open the fridge.

That’s wonderful and you are heroes.

A funeral I attended recently had a plywood coffin and a bunch of felt-tip pens for people to write messages with. At another one a while back, the coffin was wickerwork.

I want this too. I saw a documentary about a dying man who took this option. They interviewed him about the decision, then after his death filmed medical students dissecting him (from a distance, it was discreet) and interviewed them about the experience. They were grateful for his gift, and incredibly respectful when speaking about him.

The thing is, the inside of a body looks nothing like the nice tidy diagrams. It’s a mess in there! I’d like these kids to practise on dead me before they start cutting into live people.

I visited Bhutan in 2008 when democracy had just been introduced. I asked someone what he thought about it, and he kind of sighed and said, " People were happy with the old system, but the king wanted this so we’re going along with it." Big shrug.

Part of the 49% the bot left out: "Employed by the now-defunct Omani private firm Dahra Global Technologies and Consultancy Services, they were contracted for providing training and related services to Qatar’s armed forces.

“While the charges have never been made public, media reports hinted at the possibility of their being charged with espionage.”

I wonder if that’s the one child policy biting them in the bum. They ditched it nearly ten years ago I think. It ended up causing a few social problems - like the one child left looking after aging parents and grandparents, and the “little emperor” thing of spoiled brats. Also skewed the ratio of men to women quite a bit.

It’s like when they decided sparrows were stealing grain, so they set about killing sparrows in their millions - only to have crops devastated by the insects the sparrows had previously been eating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign (A billion sparrows, apparently. Idiots.)

Especially ancient Africa! Look up Mansa Musa, king of Mali. Carthage too. Zimbabwe. Benin. Egypt too, it’s in Africa.

With my luck I’d die of a katipo spider bite in the first month lol. Also, I’m minded of the scene in the film Boy, where said boy is cooking tea for the family. “Ah no, not crayfish again!” whines his sister. (Though I can’t imagine getting sick of crayfish.) Ask yourself why the Māori started eating tītī/muttonbird…. that smacks of desperation. Pack a few kūmara in your bag, maybe an axe and a box of matches?

Thanks for posting this. I’ve got an Oppo Find, a few years old now but it’s the best phone I’ve had in terms of keeping up its speed, battery etc with age. The camera is a little sub-par though, so it’s interesting seeing how much better this new Oppo’s camera is. I would never have considered buying a foldable, but I’m curious to see one in person after reading this. I reckon my current phone has another good year in it though.

Gigi. Absolutely fucking horrified when I watched it as an adult. “Thank heavens for leetle girls.” Yikes. It’s all about a courtesan (high class prostitute) bringing up her daughter to also be a courtesan. Happy ending: she gets married!! Phew!

Actually my first movie might have been a Shirley Temple one. I remember her singing Good Ship Lollipop on a plane with a lot of grown men. At some point her mother got run over - they didn’t show the accident but she was carrying Shirley’s birthday cake, with a plane on it, and you saw the cake crashing to the ground and the plane smashed up. I haven’t seen it since so I have no idea what was going on.

I’m really old btw. All us kids used to go to the pictures every Saturday morning. First up were cartoons, then maybe a serial (Tarzan), then an interval, then the main feature.