“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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17 December 2015

A MESSAGE IN THE SKIES

In blistering heatwaves like the record belting South Australia's enduring, I like to gaze into this favourite photograph, taken by the Melbourne-based ocean-racing sailor and photographer, Annie S. Boutrieng.

Yesterday was the beginning of a frying record hot spell ... senior Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Matt Collopy reports that such a four-day blitz of temperatures above 40C  “has never happened in December since records began in 1887”.

On a brief venture forth into the dazzle and fry, I  just bumped into Michael Lane, the vineyard and farm manager of the Yangarra vineyards that surround me ... I don't know how blokes like him can handle watching his hundreds of acres of precious babies endure conditions like this.

"Just gotta keep doing the best we can do," he said, with textbook stoicism. 

Map courtesy of the Bureau of Meteorology Australia

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