8degreesoflatitude

Richard Laidlaw on things that interest, engage and enrage

  • Mr Porter’s Problem

    Thursday, Mar. 4, 2021 It’s not that he’s an entitled brat who’s never properly grown up. It isn’t that he counts himself among a group of Liberal politicians who style themselves The Swinging Dicks (a tip, fellas: buy better underwear). It isn’t that, as a consequence of his all-too-common adolescent male fantasy, he’s in that […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    March 4, 2021
    Australia, Law
  • The God Squad Has the Crayon

    Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2021 Other people’s fairy stories have never bothered me. We’re all entitled to a little fantasy. It’s polite, too, to keep one’s own counsel on the sublime veracities that other people like to claim illuminate the liturgies with which humankind’s need for fiction has underpinned their lives. It is no moment, to […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    January 27, 2021
    Australia
    Honours, Margaret Court
  • Here’s Mud in Your Boots! Cheers!

    Sunday, Jan. 24, 2021 This week we will be marking our first Australia Day in country in fifteen years. Throughout the decade and a half that preceded April 2, 2020, when we were FIFOing as a lifestyle, we always managed to be absent for the rounds of increasingly strident and mawkish flag-waving and gong-giving that […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    January 24, 2021
    Australia
    Australia Day, Bennelong
  • Tracking down the Morons

    Kealy, Western Australia Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2020 We’re getting to know our new home area better, now that the temperatures are generally up a degree or two on deep midwinter and the rain, while still frequent and chill to the skin, is more likely to be in the form of showers and thus is relatively […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    November 18, 2020
    Australia, Society
  • Silence is No Longer Golden

    BOOK REVIEW: GODS AND DEMONS A foreign correspondent’s memoir | Deborah Cassrels It’s certainly not Scoop, and Deborah Cassrels is hardly Evelyn Waugh. But there are enough fanciful echoes of imagined distant drums in Cassrels’ book, and there’s sufficient colourful reportage, to prompt consideration of the demerits of figjamery. According to the book cover, it […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    October 26, 2020
    Books
    Australia, Bali, Foreign Correspondents, Indonesia, Ubud Writers and Readers Festival
  • Feisty Gal

    Mara Wolford, 1969-2020 Soon after the Distaff and I left Indonesia at the beginning of April this year, Mara Wolford sent me an SMS from Bali. It said, simply, “I’m glad you’re safe at home. That is all.” I thought nothing of it at the time. Wolford had a penchant for oblique reference. It complemented […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    July 7, 2020
    Friends
  • Officially an Elderly Obstruction

      THE CAGE   Sunday, Dec. 1, 2019     My diary noted today that 2019 had now produced 12 rabbits and that our household – that comfortably mannered and predominantly civil paradigm that is not quite entirely virtual since wherever it has been it has always had some physical form – has been smoke-free […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    December 1, 2019
    Australia, Book writers
    Clive James, When I’m 75
  • How High Can Everest Rise?

    This appears in Quadrant magazine’s November 2019 issue, just out. The Dizzying Heights Ross Fitzgerald and Ian McFadyen ISBN No: 978-1-925736-30-4 Hybrid Publishing : Melbourne pp. 248, $24.99.   Review by Richard Laidlaw It’s plainly very difficult being a political satirist these days, when the politicians seem to have cornered the market themselves and to have […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    November 1, 2019
    Australia, Book Reviews, Books, Writing
    Ian McFadyen, Ross Fitzgerald
  • It Will Be Meowvellous

    Bali Sep. 4, 2019 Australian Elizabeth Henzell, from the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, is a fixture in Ubud and runs Villa Kitty at Lod Tunduh, although it might be more accurate to say that it runs her, since that’s the way of much charity work in Bali. She would modestly demur, no doubt, at the […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    September 4, 2019
    Animal Welfare, Bali
    Elizabeth Henzell, Villa Kitty
  • Silence! Well, Sort Of

    Richard Laidlaw Bali, Mar. 7, 2019 IT’S Nyepi today in Bali. Tomorrow, Mar. 8, 2019 CE, it will be the first day of 1941 in the Balinese Hindu Caka (say Shaka) calendar of 210 days. We’ve been more or less fixtures in Bali since 1926. Our first Nyepi, back in the Roaring Caka Twenties, was […]

    8degreesoflatitude

    March 7, 2019
    Bali
    Nyepi, Silent Day
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