A recap of where it’s at.

I have Peter Schilling’s ‘Major Tom’ — the German version — on auto-repeat because the spaceship in his 1982 music video beats anything in Another Life (2019) which I’m watching for no reason except to punish myself with Katee Sackhoff.

100 minus your age is how much you owe a novel (or Netflix) before you abandon it for being dull. I stopped reading Moby Dick, Les Misérables, Ulysses, Infinite Jest and The Brothers Karamazov well before 6% yet I’m somehow at S2E6 of this Sackhoff’s latest flop.

Blame it on inertia.

Luckily, there has been a forced interruption.

My wife has elderly relatives in South Australia we needed to visit, folk so old they could abandon a haiku without a second though. Added bonus, we get to revisit the Port Elliott Bakery. By comparison, world, y’all don’t know how to bake a pie.

Turns out it was closed.

So we bought a painting by Lorraine Lewitzka instead, and while a Cornish pastie would have been cheaper, we have a lot of blank walls back home.

This is not the painting, its a random photograph of the South Australian coastline.

Sad to miss out on my baked goods, I compensated by feasting on a local dish called ‘Down by the Sea’ which (you guessed it) involves scrummy seafood.

This fortified me for the extended family luncheon, where I have to say nothing makes you feel more alpha than lunching with octogenarians…

We left them lamenting the brevity of our visit, which is a nice way to go.

I’m home now and about to hang our Lewitzka, but my memory of the trip is not the coastal walks or my MIL’s good-natured prattling but my uncle-in-law Warwick’s long look as we parted way.

Warwick (third from left) is very frail. I wonder if that was the look of a man who knows he may not see us again?

I hope he’s wrong, because the next time we’re down I’d like us to walk down to the Port Elliot Bakery and shout him a pastie.

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