Rest Day and Birthday

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Another birthday. As my favourite youngest daughter would say… I am now 80 years old minus 9.

So to grip a preoccupation about flying back to the UK from Brisbane and being unable to speak to anyone at my travel agent or my airline I visited a local travel agent. They’d been dealing with the cancellation of flights and knew the likely solutions, which were a refund, offer of a (much) later flight date or…. it was over and I could fly. Whichever way it went I had to wait. My flight was too far out for them to be thinking about little old me. Paul, still tenaciously holding onto his responsibility of being my ‘angel of the blacktop’, using his vast flying experience sent similar soothing messages about it being ultimately alright.

Clearly, we’re all wondering what’s going on in the US President’s head as regard the immediate future. However, if anyone can work that out they could run a several day psychology conference.

Tamworth promotes itself aggressively as the Australian capital of the genre. (I had in my mind it was an interesting destination but it was on my route to Brisbane not a detour to visit the town.) The history is that a radio station became pre-eminent out of Tamworth playing early country music, that progressed to having an award event and then the town became the venue for a large annual January festival. There are lots of statues snd plaques around the town plus the museum but little else, outside of January, to remotely suggest it’s a vibrant hub of banjos and fiddles! Like Aussie Rules football, utes and Holden cars it is a peculiarly Australian phenomenon yet its evolution bears a lot of similarities to American country music such as English, Scottish and Irish folk music influences, large rural populations who played their own music for entertainment, the spread of its popularity through radio then on to TV.

Even with my knowledge of the genre I had little or no recognition of the artists bar a few: Keith Urban, Kasey Chambers, Tommy Emmanuel and Frank Ifield. We could debate how ‘country’ these four are in any case. I suspect readers haven’t heard of any of them! My memorable take away from the museum was the Receptionist. She was Iranian and had come, with her husband three years ago to Tamworth. We talked about the war (and not my relatively trivial problems) and her family back in the country and where it all might go at the end with the murderous Iranian Revolutionary Guard still embedded. She was hopeful. I dearly hope she’s right.

So contemplating my departure I thought I’d wipe down the bike. I’d got filthy putting the lock cable on the wheel and thought I should address this. To my horror I found a broken spoke on the rear wheel. I needed to get this fixed before I left the relative metropolis of Tamworth for smaller towns over the next 250 miles. It was going to be Saturday tomorrow when the only opportunity presented itself, all bike shops shut on a Sunday, and I needed to beg immediate attention at the shop I turned up at earlier today. Anna absorbed my misery and, as usual after feeling sorry for myself, I got on with trying to sort out the immediate problem in front of me.