Heat

There are no words to describe the heat around here. All the words have been used before; used so often their meaning has dried up, withered away like a night-blossom in the sun.

I can't believe I used to live in something like this. Except, of course, that Cairns wasn't so bad for six or seven months of the year. Only during the four or five months surrounding the wet season was it anything like this. The rest of the year it was almost civilised, in comparison. But that hot, wet period... how many of them did I live through? How did I do it?

I remember a lot of swimming: the ocean, warm and green and turbulent along the sharply angled coral sand beaches that form behind the barrier reef. Sure, the box jellyfish might end your life in an explosion of unendurable agony, but if if you know the terrain and you know the rules, you risk it anyway, just for the blessed relief of the water.

Rainforest rock pools, clearer than finest crystal and sun-shot under the whispering canopy of leaves. Pick the wrong one, though, and you're swimming with a man-eating crocodile. Still: if you know the territory and you know the rules, you take the risk anyway, because you're already half-mad from heat and sweat.

Murderously chlorinated swimming pools, shimmering pale blue, with that unmistakeable, unforgettable smell of wet concrete and urine, steaming under the sun, water that turns your eyes red and bloodshot, clouds your vision, turns your hair green. But it's still water, and you go in anyway, trying not to think of all those other bodies, all those little kids pissing happily into the same pool where you're swimming, trying to get some relief from the filthy, sweaty, stinking, cloying heat.

That for Cairns, and the summertime. But heat's a bitch with a long, long reach. Even Brisbane knows her, from time to time. The weather turns sullen, nasty and the sky goes hard and brassy. The winds die away to nothing. The city bakes and steams.

There's no relief with nightfall. Not until three, maybe four hours after dark does the concrete and asphalt finish giving up the worst of the sun's warmth. The air is still and heavy. Mosquitoes whine in the high-ceilinged corridors of the old wooden houses. Then the sun rises, and it starts all over again.

A day. Two days. Maybe three, even four, but finally it breaks. It starts in the west, with mountainous masses of cloud towering to the sky. As the afternoon wears on, the clouds get darker, turn slate-blue, maybe green, sinister colours like a fading bruise. Tattered rags of wind, fitful at first, then gusty and threatening, toss fallen leaves, scraps of plastic, shreds of paper, but the wind isn't cool at all: it's hot, like the breath of the devil himself.

Lightning flickers. Growling, muttering, thunder rolls around the edges of the beaten sky.

Then the rain comes down. Cold, heavy, stinging, it comes with such force on the tin roofs and the gutters and the frangipanis and jacarandas that you have to shout to be heard above the roar. The wind throws the treetops back and forth with savage strength. Hailstones – always the size of golf balls, for some reason – come shattering from the skies. Water like a cascade, like a citywide Niagara pours down, jumps up again from the puddles and the pools, the debris-choked gutters, the streets and the sidewalks. The world exists in brilliant instants, flashes of flickering, searing light followed by sounds too big to be heard, huge, savage, rasping crackles and vast booms that resonate in your chest and your belly.

And then it fades away, and suddenly, miraculously, the city is cool again. For a while, anyhow.

That's a Brisbane summer storm. That's heat, the way they do it there.

Not here. It's relentless here. If you sleep at all, it's fitful, twisting and turning on sweat-damp sheets. You have air-con. That's a given, these days, unless you're out in the bush somewhere, but it's only so much use. Step outside, the heat's still there, waiting right outside your door, waiting to envelop you, swallow you, eat you alive. And inside; that air-con hums and knocks and clicks and growls, and streams of too-cold air pour over you until the thermostat is convinced you've had enough, and the machine shuts down. But the heat's still there, right behind all that empty technological trickery, and the moment the cooler sighs to a halt, it sneaks back in. Under the doors, through the glass of the windows, seeping through the very walls and floors, it crawls right into bed with you, snuggling up close, clinging to your skin like a moist, sticky tongue, intimate and vile. You sweat. Armpits, crotch, neck. Where your chest and belly touch the mattress, the bedding grows damp. You move, roll, let your skin breathe, but now your back is starting to sweat, and your ass, and the backs of your legs. Irritably half asleep, you kick the sheets off, but the aircon starts up again and the sheen of sweat starts to cool on your skin and you shiver, drag the sheets back up, and the whole cycle starts over.

Fans are no good at all. They just whine and wheeze, and push masses of hot air around the room, annoy the mosquitoes, maybe. Still, at least they're consistent. No highs and lows, no thermostat-induced sine-waves of wakefulness. If you can fall asleep at all under a fan, you'll stay that way until morning raises the stakes.

The sun is up and doing business around seven, but by eight, it's already a hammer, a cudgel, a goddam Zulu knobkerrie pulsing away in the east, and everything shimmers and steams under its impact. There's no real dawn nor dusk in the tropics; it's pretty much an on/off switch between light and dark, between steaming, moist, nocturnal heat and the fierce, deadly, crushing blast furnace of the day.

Indoors, in the shade, hoarding the last goodwill of the night behind thick walls of concrete and stone and deep, recessed windows, you're already sweating. Thick, glutinous, the stuff drips from your hairline, greases your armpits, turns your crotch into a slimy swamp. You wear cotton, maybe linen, grit your teeth when it soaks through and clings to your skin like fungus. The air doesn't move at all. The sky might as well be dead, killed by the fierce golden rage of the sun.

The locals aren't stupid. Watch them: they don't start business until ten thirty or later, using those last, precious, almost-bearable hours of the morning as personal time. Then, through the weariest hours of the day they go about their work: indoors, in the shade, in the air conditioning if they can arrange it. The work goes on until sundown, and only then does the place begin returning to life.

The daytime heat is beyond oppressive. It's heavy, like a fresh corpse draped over your shoulders. It weighs you down with every step. If you walk, you do it slowly. If you have to lift, or carry, or work, you do it in short bursts and you rest in between. You drink a lot of water. Litres of it. You feel like a drainpipe, because as fast as it goes in, it comes out again, soaking your clothes, streaming down your skin, making your sandals slick and slippery. You drink, and you drink some more, and you're thirsty all the time, and the only way to win is to remember that sweat is more than just water. It's salt, and electrolytes, and you have to replace some of that stuff or all the water in the world won't help you.

They do good sports drinks here. Really good. I stick with one called 100+. Carbonated, you can get it everywhere, in icy-cold cans beaded with condensation. Rip the top off one, you can drain it in a single long draught, and even though it's a little sickly from the glucose, a little brackish from the salt, it's cold and sharp and it tastes absolutely right and when you're done you realise that yes, that was exactly what your body needed.

Not enough, though. Never enough. And when the lightning flickers and the thunder growls and the rain sheets down, it's still not cool. The rain itself is warm, warm as blood, warm as sweat. Walk through it, feel it soak your clothes until they cling like a second skin, but you're still hot, and now it feels like the biggst sauna, the biggest sweat-bath in all history. The rain brings no relief.

And after the rain? Still no better. Worse, if anything. If it's daytime, the sun comes out and the steam rises from every surface, turning the air into a filthy soup. You want to know about Borneo after a rainstorm? Easy: put a stinking, sweat-soaked sock over your head like a balaclava mask, so you have to strain to draw the air into your lungs. Now step into a sauna. Instant tropics. Want the beach experience? Pour damp sand into your underpants. Don't bother with the salt water; you're already soaked completely with sweat.

My wife complains about the cold in Tasmania. I don't understand it, personally. For me, twelve degrees centigrade is about the point where I start thinking that just maybe I should bother to put on a shirt. But Natalie? Anything under 25, and she's kvetching and carping like a Russian grandma in the depths of a Siberian blizzard.

Screw that. You can always put on more clothing if you're cold. But when you're dealing with the kind of filthy heat you get in the tropics – well, there's only so much clothing you can take off before you're down to your skin. And where do you go after that?

Reporting In From Kota Kinabalu

Ahhh, back to the itty-bitty keyboard.

We finished up the Singapore jaunt in fine style, riding around the place on the Duck And Hippo bus service. D&H maintain two hop-on, hop-off bus routes with open-top double-decker buses. It's a good way to get your bearings, although you do have to put up with a fair bit of 'canned history' as you drive past various buildings around the place.

Singapore is kind of daunting. I think it was William Gibson who described as sort of a 'theme park' version of a South East Asian city –€“ it looks the part splendidly, but under the facade it's carefully sanitized, and virtually all elements of danger and uncertainty are gone. Of course, that does make it a good place to introduce three young, Tasmanian kids to the weirdnesses of this stretch of the world. And possibly as part of that theme-park quality, the people of Singapore were relentlessly friendly.

Everywhere we stopped to eat, various locals would pop up to tease and play with the kids. Part of it, I expect, is the simple fact that the kids are light-haired and very kid-cute in appearance. Part of it is also that the kids have never been taught to be fearful of differences in people. They're a little shy at times when they're out of their territory, but they're still energetic and inquisitive.

Also, they're pretty fearless about their eating. (Well, except for the Mau-Mau. But she's extra cute, so that makes up for it.) As a result, we tend to dive into the local food courts and roadside eateries without hesitation, and since we're clearly tourists, that draws attention to the kids.

It's nice, really. Singapore has a very friendly, very relaxed sort of vibe to it, a thoroughly child-friendly feel. We took a trip to the Botanic gardens, for example: hot as blazes, and even though the kids were strongly interested in the Evolution Gardens, the Spice Gardens and the Fruit Tree Gardens, they were really starting to flag. Until we reached the specially designed and designated Children's Garden.

It's brilliant. Separated from the main gardens, you enter through a controlled turnstile. Parents with kids go through without question, but if you're an adult without a child, you need a reason to be in there... and they'll escort you.

Once inside, it's a place that could have been designed by kids. A wading fountain full of oddball water equipment and games. Climbing equipment. A hedge maze. A multi-level treehouse with huge slides. A 'cave'. Ponds, swaying rope bridges, hollow trees to hide and play in, plenty of shade, interesting educational displays on ecology and plant life... our 'flagging' kids ran wild for an hour, and had to be dragged out with the promise of ice cream and soft drinks all round.

Yeah, Singapore. Kid-friendly, proud of themselves, and on the go. Interesting place. Looking at the buildings going up, the incredible, monumental architecture happening there, it's clear the GFC was something that happened to other people, not to Singapore. There's this new resort development. Backed –€“ according to public knowledge –€“ by money out of Las Vegas, the place rivals Dubai. There's this one building: actually it's three separate, near-identical skyscrapers of curved blue glass, but they're joined across the top by what looks for all the world like a sleek, low-slung, long, supermodern ocean liner. Seriously: three skyscrapers with an ocean liner stretched across the top of 'em. Looming over the future museum/cultural complex, which is itself a stunning piece of work designed to look like a gigantic lotus blossom, the thing is breathtaking in its hyperconfidence. It doesn't look forward to the future: it bids fair to design that future. The whole thing says look at me and see tomorrow!

In most of the cities I've seen, it would be impossible. Dubai could have handled it. Maybe Tokyo? No. Too crowded already. Possibly the new-look cities of China, like Beijing or Shanghai. Certainly, you couldn't put it in any city of Australia without instantly redefining the entire 'weight' and locus of the city. But Singapore?

Singapore fits it in nicely.

That's not my kind of town, I fear. Visiting Singapore is fun, but I really wouldn't want to live there, cuisine or not. No spitting. No littering. No chewing gum. Clean and friendly, guys, keep it clean and friendly –€“ and all the time, that massive, oppressive weight of money floating over your head. All that finance, all that ponderous, fiscal power constantly sleeting through the air around you... it's a cliché to observe that Chinese cultures tend to be even more money-oriented than our own, but there's no getting away from that in Singapore, not for an instant. The whole place has a kind of symbiotic attachment to money with a capital M. That amazing resort complex? The bill is in excess of US $6 billion.

Six billion US dollars to build a casino/resort arrangement. And yet they must figure they're going to make a profit from the place, or they wouldn't build it, would they?

Nope. Not my kind of town.

Of course, neither is Kota Kinabalu. Still too damned tropical, you see. We're holed up in some tourist-apartment development called Marina Court, near the city centre, more or less. It's a nice place, with enough space, access to the waterfront, and –€“ as is typical of Malaysia –€“ a host of places to eat nearby.

The last time I had anything to do with Malaysia was Kuala Lumpur, back in the mid-nineties. Natalie and I were there for a few weeks while she did some kind of medical placement at the Port Klang hospital. KL was noisy, crowded, smelly, and the traffic was totally farking insane. Plus, the place was basically a lot older than Kota Kinabalu: KL was built at the juncture of two large, navigable rivers and has been a trading centre for something like five centuries. KK had the living shit bombed out of it in WWII, back when it was still called Jesselton, and so everything that's here has pretty much been built since.

They've got a clever system for inner-city living and development, though. Most of the buildings have commercial enterprises on the ground floor –€“ shops and restaurants and so forth –€“ but the buildings themselves extend two, three or more floors above, and are full of apartments. It's not a particularly attractive look. The buildings are mostly concrete, because you don't want huge walls of glass in the powerful tropical sun. Why build greenhouses when the great outdoors is a greenhouse already?

It is very sensible though. And some of the designs go farther: the building occupies an entire (small) block, bordered by parking and alleys and streets, and the interior of the ground floor becomes a big open space, an enclosed and shaded atrium for eating, resting, socialising, markets, etc. It's quite clever. Takes some getting used to, though –€“ you can look at a drab, mould-streaked concrete edifice with a few grubby shop fronts visible at street level, and never realise that if you go through any of those shops or restaurants, and out the back door, you'll enter the living, breathing heart of the building, where its inhabitants do their thing out of reach of the pounding glare of the equatorial sun.

The kids are doing far better than I expected, I admit. Of course, we don't push them too hard. They're good for maybe an hour at a time walking around outside before they have to have some kind of a break. And after three or four hours, it's DEFINITELY time to retreat to the apartment with its air- on, or out to the pool. But they're getting through it, showing some interest in what's around, lapping up the food, checking out the sights...

So, that's where we're at. Next stop: a three day foray into Sandakan, where the Sepilok orangutan rehabilitation centre is, and then farther still, up the Kinabatang river in pursuit of Borneo's wildlife. Should be entertaining...l

Singapore, Shit, I'm Still Only In Singapore...

Twenty-four hours in Singapore; already, I remember all too clearly why I don't live in the tropics any more.

The kids did really well on the flight across. It's an eight-hour jaunt from Melbourne to Singapore, but thanks to the wonders of modern technology, that's eight hours which can be spent playing video games or catching up on Stephen Chow movies. Elder Son and I both watched 'From Beijing With Love', which is pretty fraggin' funny if you've ever seen a Sean Connery/James Bondflick, and still pretty damned funny even if you haven't. I also sort of watched 'Kick-Ass', which was both better and worse than I suspected. I may have to watch it again, though. It's about two hours long, but it took me nearly four hours to get through it, what with the constant interruptions from Younger Son, on my right.


Anyway, we landed in Singapore, and made it through customs in good time, without a hitch. Well – one hitch, anyhow, though that one occurred twenty-four hours beforehand. Natalie had prepped for the trip by laying in a stock of sleeping tablets. She doesn't sleep well at the best of times, and as you may guess, shared hotel rooms do not constitute the best of times. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have occurred to her that Singapore might have different drug laws to Australia. I, however, was less sanguine, and I jumped on the Net to do a little research. ...Annnd it turns out you can take presrcription benzodiazepams to Singapore – but only if you notify their people at least ten working days in advance.

So. Now I shall be shepherding a sleep-deprived wife around the place, as well as the three kids. Yay.

We made it to the Landmark Village Hotel without trouble. It's a good choice: there's plenty of local shopping and eating – Bugis street is no more than a stone's throw away, and there's a lovely mosque right on our street corner – and we're within walking distance of Chinatown and Little India, but the hotel itself is clean and solid. Minor issues: not enough bedding for the Mau-mau, because apparently they didn't realise we'd actually want a foldaway bed for her. No big deal: she's happy to sleep curled up on the floor between a couple of beds.

An evening expedition acquainted the kids with true tropical weather. Thirty-odd degrees of heat, and the air practically wringing with moisture. Personally, I completely hate it, and I have done so since I was a wee kid. I will never understand my father's proclivity for the tropics.

We wandered aimlessly around until we found a hole-in-the-wall food court, and then for about twenty Singapore dollars, we stuffed ourselves on ubiqitously tasty Malay food. Yeesh. I know things are improving in Australia, but honestly, the food culture still has a very long way to go before it reaches Singapore standards. Even the kids were pleased. Half the time I had no idea what was being put in front of 'em, but it was all tasty, and it went down a treat.


We're making great fun of trying odd things: bizarre soft drinks (Pocari Sweat; Aloe Vera Juice with Peach Nectar and Pulp), strange clothing (the boys both now have a set of silken shirt and trousers which would fit right in with any of Jackie Chan's Chinese period-piece movies) and most especially, fruit. I bought a decent serve of durian from a market last night, and insisted everyone give it a go. Despite the fact that the stuff reeks like garlic, carrion, cat-pee and fermenting mango, the kids screwed up their faces and had a try.

Now, let's just expand on the description for a moment. The pulp is roughly the colour of over-ripe avocado flesh, but it has a texture a lot like near-melted ice cream. And it tastes... um... it tastes... well, it's sweet, but that's not what you notice first. For me, the first thing is the pungent blast of onion/garlic, then the sweetness, and then the horrid, cloying banana-mango fruit flavour.

Durian is often called 'The King Of Fruits' in this part of the world, but for my money, Elton John still has that particular title locked up. Durian is just plain horrible.

The kids were good about it though. And an old, teak-coloured Chinese gent standing nearby on the street while we were sampling this... ugliness... just about shit himself with good-natured laughter at their responses. He managed to recover enough to send us the thumb's-up, and generally let us know he thought we were doing the proper parental thing, but for a minute or two there I was worried about his heart. I guess watching three white kids take on their first batch of durian is pretty funny, mind you.

I made up for the durian by buying a couple kilos of mangostines, You can't get these in Tassie at all, and it's rare enough to find 'em in more northerly parts of Oz. Mangostines are one of my all-time favourite tropical fruits, and we chomped our way through two kilos without much effort at all.

And then it was bedtime.

Of course, the younger two haven't even come close to adjusting their body clocks for the time change yet. Nat and I, we tried keeping them up late. Didn't go to lights-out until 2130. That was 2330 Tas time, and when you realise their usual bedtime is 2000, you'll understand why we hoped they might sleep in just a little, given that they'd travelled several goddam thousand kilometres in the interim.

Nope. Not a hint of it. 0500 local time: Younger Son and the Mau-Mau were up and at it with a vengeance. At just shy of 0700, a very frazzled Natalie bonged the doorbell to the room I'm sharing with Elder Son. He and I were both still in the dark, mostly asleep. But we pulled ourselves together, and went down for breakfast. Then we all shouldered arms, and went for a Big Walk.

Big Mistake.

Apparently, pretty much nothing opens for business before 1030 in Singapore. Sure, mostly they'll then stay open until 2230... but if you happen to be burdened with a couple over-active kids at around 0800, you're fucked.

We walked. Past Bugis St and all the shopping – closed, yes. Found the legendary Raffles Hotel, and managed to snag an expensive Yum Cha second breakfast... but the shops were all closed, as were the various museums and tours. So we walked farther. Found a toilet in the Raffles City shopping mall, though pretty much all the shops were closed, yep. Walked farther still, Found Chinatown – mostly closed. Bought a little dizi (odd Chinese flute) in the one-and-only store which was open in an interesting spiral mall thing... and surprised hell out of the proprietor by playing it easily. Walked down some kind of a mall/street lined with little stalls and stores, even though it was just barely opening up...

By this time, the heat and humidity had really put the zap on the kids. Every step, they were groaning and complaining of life-threatening tiredness. I have to admit, I knew better, but I couldn't convince Natalie... so in the end, we climbed into a cab and went back to the hotel.

Lo and behold! Three minutes in the air-con, and all three kids are running back and forth, bouncing on beds, and making goddam nuisances of themselves. Tired? Who, us? No way!

I'd tried to explain it to Natalie, but she's always been in denial about the tropics. Truth is, when the heat and the humidity close in like hammers, the kids feel trashed. They're sweating, they're uncomfortable, the air is hot in their lungs – and their bodies are telling 'em that they've obviously done so much activity that their metabolism is overheating. The closest sensation they know is the tiredness that comes from prolonged physical activity.

But they're not tired. Not really. The moment they cool down, all that energy kicks in, and they're back on the move.

Think kindly of me, friends. My wife isn't sleeping. The kids are bamboozled by the tropics and they know not the meaning of jet-lag. And I have to keep them all from killing each other until this holiday is over...

Preparing

House-sitter - check.

Cats and dogs organised - check

Pet rats farmed out to Amazing Neighbour Anna - check

Chooks organised - check

Packing - check

Documents - check

Electronic bumff (video recorders, cameras, music machines, rechargers, memory sticks, batteries, netbook computer, etc) - check

Children - squabbling perpetually

Wife - teetering

Sanity - sadly missing.

I fkn LOVE holidaying.

Mixed Feelings

On the good side of the ledger: I have finally -- it would seem -- defeated the useless dog and his braindead desire to bark loopily up and down the deck when the children come inside.

See, we have this dog. Kelpie plus a few other things. Smart as hell, but a dedicated working-type dog. Loves the kids. Likes to herd the kids. Gets real freaky if the kids are playing together somewhere, and it can't get at them.

The house has a long, north-facing wall, which makes sense in Tas. Along that wall, there is a long, narrow, low-set deck. It keeps the mud at bay in winter, and provides an excellent spot for outdoor chairs and beers. Unfortunately, when the kids come inside, the dog haunts that stretch of deck. It runs back and forth from the sun room all the way to the laundry, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of them, so it can continue herding them. And when they make noise - as children of ages 5, 7, and 10 often do - the dog loses it's nana and starts to bark.

I fuckin' hate that. Especially at 0715 in the morning, when Natalie has the day-shift and I've been writing until 0100. Jeez, I hate that.

So. We tried a shock collar. No good: unreliable, ate batteries. We tried a citronella collar. No good: expensive and the dog developed a citronella habit. (I swear!)

Desperate, I found a cheap-ass ultrasonic collar. It worked! But it was cheap, and eventually it died. And the dog gradually recovered his stupid habit.

So I have purchased a stand-alone unit that is now hanging up outside. And it's set so that when the dog barks, it emits a nasty ultrasonic warbling.

Lo! The dog no longer barks!

He shows no distress when the unit is triggered. It won't affect his job of looking after the driveway (south side of the house) or the garage (western side.) And when he sees something that disturbs him (the dog that tried to visit the chickens the other day) he can, and does, still bark on the deck. But for his goddam every-day up-and-down-the-deck look-at-me bullshit barking, it does the trick.

Yay!

Now: the downside.

I'm married to a doctor. Sometimes that gets weird.

She was teaching two medical students to stitch today. To do that, she bought a couple of pork hocks. Pork hocks? What are they good for? Ahh. Apparently, once the stitching was over and done with, the hocks have now become a food item. I am to cook them. And feed my family, plus two medical students. Oops, belay that: phone call just came through, and I have two more doctors to feed on top of that.

Luckily, I also purchased a large pork shoulder roast. I have taters. I have salad greens. I have rosemary and garlic. I have rich dark chocolate and eggs and I have pastry shells. I have decent wine. I have cream cheese and wasabi, more cream cheese and chives. I have smoked salmon, and a variety of biscuits. Coffee is stocked. Port is standing by.

And why?

Because I know my wife. I knew perfectly well that it wouldn't just be two medical students! Ha!

The well-prepared country cook... that's me.

Now, the really irritating news: apparently, the bill for air-conditioning tents in Iraq and Afghanistan (something like US $20 billion) is more than the ENTIRE FUCKING BUDGET for NASA (at about US $18 billion)

I really hope that's just another stupid Internet rumour.

Gotta go now. Time to throw the bits of pig in the oven.

Children And Climate Change

I didn't want children.

I love my kids very much, and I'm glad they're here, but I've always felt that being a parent is a total commitment with tremendous responsibility. One chooses very carefully how and when one brings a child into the world.

Suppose we had our imaginary Zombie plague, and day-to-day survival became an unpredictable horrorshow. Would you start a family under those circumstances?

Of course not. At the very least, you'd try to organise some sort of real security before you brought babies into the world. After all, there's no point in raising 'em if they're only zombie-fodder, right?

But -- what if the Zombies hadn't arrived yet? What if you knew they were coming, and nobody was really preparing, and they were certainly going to arrive within a couple decades, at most? Maybe even less than a decade? Would you decide to raise children, knowing their adulthood was extremely uncertain, knowing the world they would inherit would be a fearsome, poisoned place?

I know some people would still do it. My wife, for example. On my own, I would choose otherwise.

Now. Here's the real thinking:

The braindead cretins who insist there is no such thing as global warming/climate change can safely be ignored. If you look at the state of the world, you can very easily, very clearly see a huge range of rapidly developing crises. All of them, more or less, relate to global human overpopulation, and the effects of fossil-fuel driven industries and agriculture. The list touches virtually every aspect of the existence of life on earth. It includes, but is not limited to:

• Desertification
• global warming
• oceanic acidification
• deforestation and environmental degradation
• the end of oil
• the end of readily available phosphorous
• limits to available fresh water
• limits to available arable land
• the end of vital techno-minerals (indium, gallium, etc)
• pesticide resistance
• antibiotic resistance
• rapid, global loss of biodiversity

There are plenty more. That is just a nice list to go on with. Some of 'em you probably won't even have heard about yet. You can either trust me when I say they are real, and serious, or you can go and do your own research. I don't mind either way. It won't change the facts. What's important is the interpretation you place on them.

Now, I regard myself as a reasonably informed, rational thinker. And as such, I cannot look at this list without concluding that the way of life we've enjoyed as a result of our use of fossil fuels and our technology is about to come to a grinding halt. Without a game-changing breakthrough such as cheap, reliable nuclear fusion energy, there is no way we can go on as we are.

I was aware of these problems ten years ago when my wife declared that children were a non-negotiable part of our relationship. At that time, I licked my finger, held it to the wind, and figured we probably had twenty years, maybe, before things really got difficult.

And then, because I love her, I agreed.

In agreeing, I brought three new human lives into a world which, I believe, will not sustain them as it has sustained me. I don't know how that's going to turn out. I'm very much a generalist, not a specialist: don't ask me for precise predictions in any one area, because I can't do it. (Not, I note, that the specialists are doing much better.) But short of a true technological miracle, I cannot imagine a way for it to end well.

The best I could do, ten years ago, was to convince Natalie to come to Tasmania.

Having children changed my personal outlook in terms of politics and activism. Birmo's latest online column talks about 'climategate', and in the comments, someone raises the idea that the world's political leaders have quietly decided that preventing climate change is no longer possible, so they're working towards living with it, and mitigating it.

That's how I feel about things. If I was to work politically towards conservation and towards decent stewardship of the earth, it would take all my time and energy. I'd probably wind up right out on the fringes, heading up various government agencies' list of 'potentially dangerous individuals'. But I can't do that and be a good father. Quite simply, the level of commitment necessary to even start to spark change or make a difference would require me to be unattached in virtually every way.

It's probably a good thing, really. Because underneath the sadness and the frustration, I really am very deeply angry about the way the governments and corporations of the world have bent us all over and fucked us on this matter. Angry enough that if I wasn't needed as a parent, I might well have decided to turn around and push back in the most direct and effective ways I can imagine. And I have quite a good imagination.

Never mind. It's coming, whether I like it or not. And I agreed to have children, and I have to make the best of that decision and do the very best for them that I can. So to everyone else, out there in the rest of the world: good luck. We're all going to need it.

Dear Chinese Porn Spammer

Dear Chinese Porn Spam Person

I'll make you a deal.

I've noticed the last few times you've put your inevitable link to some porn site or another in the comments section that you've actually gone so far as to include a comment. Not only that, but your comments have been creeping towards relevance.

For example: in the previous post, regarding my family and I preparing to go on holiday, you wrote 'Readiness is all'... and then added the porn link.

Now, I've got nothing against porn as such, as long as it's all about consenting adults, y'know? So if you really want to put links to porn in the comments on my blog... why should I care? The only reason I've been kicking your links off the comments is because you add nothing to the discussion.

'Readiness is all' is almost a contribution. But it's not good enough, I'm afraid, because it's a platitude. A cliche. A meaningless statement that incites no thought, provokes no reaction, achieves no end, adds no value. And therefore, your comment got the boot.

So here's the deal: you make yourself an active contributor hereabouts, and I'll leave your porny linkages in perpetuity. Because I truly, really, don't care if you're hawking porn, as long as it's legal and non-harmful.

But your comments have to show some kind of thought and insight. They need to be relevant. Bonus points if they're actually funny, by the way.

Okay, Chinese Porn Spam Person. The deal's on the table. What do you say?