Friends of the Armchair Traveller

  At first sight you may think, well this is just a demolition zone? Think again. This is not a demolition zone,  it is a crime against humanity.   The Israeli Demolition Force created this pile of rubble from  what was once a thriving city in Gaza.  Gaza currently looks like a demolition zone, but that did not happen overnight.  It has taken more than 2 years to create this rubble of demolished buildings  but the monstrous people of the Israeli Government are still not satisfied. 3 DAYS AGO                                                           Israeli forces have continued their merciless bombardment          and killed more than 500 people in Gaza in the past 5 weeks! How many more have been injured in the same period. And yet the world looks on. HOW CAN THIS BE? For their ...

Tonight is Xmas eve but I'm not listening to carols. Not because I don't like carols, it's just that I don't like Xmas. New Year's celebrations with hope for the coming year is more up my alley, although I'm not optimistic that 2026 will be any better than 2025. My littler sister got me rolling with a stunning new piece which I know means a lot to her, so I include it here: This exciting gift from Chris set me thinking... why not share some favourite music around? So just to start the ball rolling, I went on a journey through some of my personal favourites which are on my YouTube special list. You may know a few of them but I don't expect you will know all  of them. They range from singers to instrumentalists, male and female performers, solos and duets!  From many parts of the wide world. Why don't we just start with this most unusual number... "Tonada De Luna Llena" Natalia Lafourcade with Gustavo Guerrero  I have a great admiration for song...

 On Sunday 9th November my little sister Chris   (known to so many of her friends as Chrissie)  celebrated a huge day in her life. Chris has been fighting cancer since the shock of her diagnosis in early 2018. At the time her partner Matt was also fighting cancer and Chris looked after Matt until he succumbed to his illness in 2019. That was a tremendously difficult period which Chris negotiated with great love and affection despite being in the horror of wondering what was going on in her own body. Chris continued receiving many different sorts of treatment for her cancer at the Peter Mac up to and throughout the horrible period of COVID which brought our entire society to a grinding halt! Then in 2021 because she was having trouble with her voice which had always been so important to her as a musician and creator of music, she started to take lessons in artwork such as sketching and watercolours. I posted the first blog about this transition in her life in September 202...

                     My friend,  Paulus Henrique Benedictus Cox (16 April 1940 – 18 June 2016) How can I say "my" friend?  Paul had hundreds of friends, thousands, everywhere. He did not "belong" to just one single person. Our friendship came about because we happened to live next door to each other for a couple of years and it grew from there. I find it extremely difficult to make this post, just as I find it extremely challenging to see any photographs of Paul, either from the time we met, or later in life, especially when he became devastated by his liver failure and transplant, his partial recovery, then another close call with an agonising abscess on the liver which tore him apart, and his last years following that. Has it really been 9 years? I don't want to "summarise" his life. I don't want to give you more information because there's heaps of information out there...  This is just to display some of my f...