Even years always work out better than odd years, I find, so I'm expecting 2008 to be really something pretty special.

Sydney's fireworks were apparently particularly spectacular this year -- though I confess I dodged the humidity & crowds & disappeared into the scrub for several days. Well, that's an exaggeration. In actual fact we had pubs, restaurants, airconditioning AND a pool. No internet access, alas. Which means I got to spend more time reading (innit that J.M. Coetzee somethin', eh?).

I've also continued reading the charming, bittersweet KATHERINE'S DIARY, by Kate Cummings. (And Kate has contacted me to let me know that you can buy her diary direct from the publisher: Beaujon Press, PO Box 742, Woy Woy, NSW, 2256. Drop a line with your contact details & she'll no doubt get back to you.)

I admit a deep envy of some details of Kate's life: she was at Sydney Uni (as John, her 'born' identity) with contemporaries including Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes. I, on the other hand, was a contemporary of Adam Spencer and ... er ... I'm not sure. I keep reading the Alumni magazine but all the rest of 'em have become scientists, or some such, & I myself am somewhat lagging in the glamour stakes (nothing like a wealth of humid weather to make you feel less than glamourous, I find).

Alas, I did also spend some time watching TV, whereby I accidentally ran into several news reports over my several days away. It used to embarrass me, my aversion to television news reports. Was I -- as I feared -- wilfully ignorant, resistant to even a cursory education in current world affairs? But ever since watching BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, I've decided no, my instinct was right. Television news is tipped towards the grotesque & terrifying, Moore argues, in order to keep consumers anxious & therefore prone to working out their anxieties via retail therapy. Or something similar. Certainly TV news is less about world affairs & more about local murders, or so I've found (except for SBS, which is actually quite interesting).

And really, I no longer need to hear about the deaths of children and the hit-&-run slayings of teenagers. I myself do not have children, though I know people who do -- and though the level of my engagement is usually around the precept that children are exceptionally loud for their height, still the idea of visiting violence on their fragile shapes is more than I have the stomach for.

Also, of course, in the middle of all this televised violence, I took myself off to watch NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. The country of Cormac McCarthy's imaginings & the Coen brothers' realisation is, indeed, not a place for old men, nor for women nor, indeed, for young people of either gender. It is a place of brutality & the occasional moment of foolishness where you keep wanting to outwit the story makers & show that it can't possibly be as bad as they're making it seem -- and you keep being thrown back in your seat with the message that 'no, it's worse'. A striking, hard film. I recommend it.