8º of latitude

Richard Laidlaw on things that interest, engage and enrage

  • Let’s Not Forget

    Saturday, Nov. 27, 2021 There’s a lovely verse in Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty’s 1978 track – it has headed my personal hit parade for more than four decades – and it seems apt, almost totemic, as a way of describing life as I am living it these days: He’s got this dream about buying some… Continue reading

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  • Is it time to consider a universal wage?

    Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021 Every cloud has a silver lining. Well, that’s if you’re lucky and you believe in ancient aphorisms. But there’s certainly a silver lining under the big covid cloud if the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) attracts you. Serious academic study of the concept and of its associated cost is… Continue reading

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  • Eye, Eye!

    Wednesday, Apr. 14, 2021 Just a little bit of whimsy ahead of an event I’m not looking forward to. This week I shall be having the first of two cataract surgeries. The first is in two days time, on Friday, Apr. 16, and the second is scheduled for May 11. I’ve read up on the… Continue reading

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  • 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… Continue reading

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  • 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… Continue reading

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  • 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… Continue reading

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  • 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… Continue reading

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  • 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… Continue reading

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  • 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… Continue reading

  • 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… Continue reading

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