A real journalist

For years, my long-suffering and wonderful wife has had to endure repeated monologues from me over breakfast about the state of journalism, how newspapers don't "do" research anymore, now it's all just opinion. And that opinion is inevitably from right-wing hacks like Miranda Devine (shudder) or Gerard Henderson (double shudder).

But, thanks to my iconoclast-loving son, Joe, my wife can now have a relatively peaceful breakfast of pancakes and George Monbiot - a journalist and author with The Guardian in the UK. Joe bought me his book, Bring on the apocalypse: six arguments for Global Justice, a collection of his articles over the past few years. I devoured it in a day. A journalist who backs up opinion with sources - a rare delight.

Don't trust me though - go to his web-site and read his work.

And feel content that you never have to buy the Sydney Morning Herald again!

fifty-one!

Happy New Year.

Happy Birthday to me.

Delicious cake.

Wine wasn't bad either...

But, as 2009 retires gracefully into the memory bank, perhaps I should do a quick review of what happened to me, before I forget!

We started the year in Sydney, in a rented flat in Newington, with me trying to write two manuscripts at once. In between bike rides along the Parramatta River, I converted an unpublished verse-novel "black painted fingernails" into the start of a prose ms and enjoyed it so much, I just kept writing. By March, I had a messy first draft. Secondly, I took an 8,000 word short story with a lead character I really liked and converted that, by the end of 2009, into a prose novel called "Slice: juicy moments from my incredible life" which is due for publication in August 2010 by Woolshed Press (Random House). I'm really looking forward to it's release, after we get back from Europe.

The rest of 2009 was preoccupied with school visits, scoring twenty goals and making the Grand Final for my Sydney football team, Lokomotiv Cove and playing football at the Masters Games, where we won a silver medal.

By September, we'd decided that Sydney wasn't really for us, so we moved back home to Katoomba, where for the first time in my thirty-year career (if that's the word for it!) as a writer, I had my own study. I now look out through double doors and across the verandah to my backyard, and on a really clear night, I can see the lights of Sydney on the plain. Most nights, however, all I see is mist and cloud and rain and fog and all the other delights of living 1,000 metres above sea level.