What a packed two months it's been! When I last updated this page, the trip to South America was still ahead of us, and suddenly now it's all over, and we're back to normal life at home. Well, in so far as life here is ever normal ...

It was indeed a magnificent four and a half weeks away. Real 'much have I travelled in the realms of gold' stuff, and it's hard to pick out highlights. Chile - and at last eating (and loving) Fish Cevice, which I'm now planning to add to my cuisine, and the colourful heritage city of Valparaiso; in Argentina learning to dance the tango, in spite of my two left feet, and wandering in the famous La Recoleta cemetery, that city of the dead in which Eva Peron is now a resident, or browsing in what has been called the most beautiful bookshop in the world 'El Atineo'. Peru and watching fascinated the expert horsemen, as gauchos put on a spectacular Peruvian Paso at the Hacienda Mamacona, and learning to drink Pisco Sours. The wonders of Machu Picchu and watching herds of alpacas and llamas in the high grasslands of the Andes (worth suffering altitude sickness for this - and I did!)  Rio de Janeiro, and the tour of the infamous favelas, with their tiers on tiers of slum housing and tangles of stolen electricity wires. Can this city really be ready for the Olympic games within the next few months? But worth the almost embarrassing luxury of the Hotel Copacabana to also find in nearly Ipamema the cafe, the Garota de Ipanema, where Jobin wrote the famous song about the girl who turned all heads on the beach front there.  The spectacular Iguassu Falls, seen from both the Brazilian and the Argentinian sides - which better? Impossible to decide.

So many highlights. Four days on the Amazon, with jungle walks, visits to small villages, piranha fishing at dusk (yes, caught two and ate them at dinner that night - a neat reversal of the status quo, I felt.) Lake Titicata, highest freshwater lake with its famous reed islands and a whole population living, often in family groups, on these man-made islands. And, of course, the Galapagos Islands, where we battled our way up dried creek river beds to heights that meant leaping from boulder to boulder to reach the top with magnificent views over this Darwinian wonderland. Coming face to face on a pathway with an enormous turtle, built like an armoured tank, and learning swiftly that I didn't have right of way.

So much to remember. I'm glad that I kept not only the daily journal, but also stuck to my resolve to write a poem a day - I've brought back the 34 poems in the set, and now have to decide what to do with them ... But writing these was, as always, one of the real joys of travelling, even on nights when I was dead tired and just craved sleep.

However, it was good to get home and discover some publishing pleasures on return: poems in the new book from Poetica Christi Press, Imagine, and in Polestar and The Mozzie, as well as the special pleasure of a lovely review of Bystanders in the May Polestar Writers' Journal, and finding that I had made it to the short list for the Stringybark Stories competition, where i received a 'highly commended' and publication in their coming book Standing By. Enough encouragement to keep me at my computer and still writing ...

Once again the weeks have slipped away, and an update on this web site is long overdue. It's been a period of bits and pieces: some writing - mainly poetry; some good news - a number of poems accepted for various journals and magazines, such as Polestar, The Write Angle, Poetry Monash, and Poetry Matters, etc; some bad news - poems rejected (enough of these to prevent hubris, just as there are enough accepted to keep me sending them out!); some guest speaking at Probus Clubs and other organisations ...  And two big agenda items: our coming trip to South America, which will be a wonderful breaking of new ground for both of us, and the beginnings of research towards a new novel. But that's on the back burner for the moment, and I'll report progress on that when it's more firmly in place.

So once again the Easter season is almost with us, and last Sunday the palms were firmly in place beside the altar with their reminder that Holy Week has begun. The weather is looking good and the garden is calling. This year we're having Easter at home, with the usual Easter egg hunt for the smaller children on Sunday morning, and maybe this year I'll once again plant bulbs for the spring.

Where have all the past years gone? asked the song writer ...  So do I.  Another year has passed, and it's somehow today the last day in January of 2016. Even more, it's a long time since I've added to this page in my web site. Strangely it's one of those things that seems to move towards the bottom of the 'to do' pile, and that pile, believe me, is considerable!

So, since October, what has happened? It's all been surprisingly trivial, but very satisfying. The usual December pre-Christmas frenzy of activity, this time lessened by the fact that instead of a huge influx of house guests, for the first time in many years we went to Canberra for a Christmas in someone else's home - to eldest daughter Felicity. Lovely to have someone else responsible for managing the daily routines, and a happy time marked by lots of wonderful food, catching up with old friends in Canberra,  a number of really good films - and, of course, lots of card-playing with eager card-shark grand-daughters. "Well, you taught us!" they say .... As I said, nothing earth-shattering in these last few months.

But a sobering time, as we attended funerals of friends of many years, with an increasing recognition of the fact that social events have moved on from the 21sts, the engagements, the marriages, the christenings, the decade birthday parties, the children's weddings ... and now we are entering the era of funerals as our most common gatherings of old friends. Sobering, indeed.

Perhaps this is is why we are seizing the day (nothing like a bit of 'carpe diem' as a motivator) and planning an imprudent but very desirable trip to South America this year. It looks wonderful, despite the shadow of falling share markets and the looming Zlika virus, and we are looking forward to it enormously - that's if we ever get through the morass of visa applications that seem to be required for every area our APT travel will take us. So we struggle with forms for Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador in an increasing recognition that we are going to be covering a lot of territory.

For me, one of the anticipated pleasures is the writing. I'll try to keep to my usual pattern of a poem a day, knowing that there's great satisfaction when, on return, David puts together my poems and photos in a book that becomes a treasured record of our time away. That will compensate for the very little bit of writing I've done in these last few months - a handful of poems, and that's been it. Not good, and it leaves me feeling very empty in spite of all life's other satisfactions. That will change ...