A personal note ...

(Above: a year dedicated to sun, surf, exercise and good health, the photo and the Twitter source).

The pond has had near death experiences before, having been pronounced dead on the operating table at the tender age of eleven.

In those days, the pond's mother determined that it was her prayers, and direct intervention with the deity that secured a reprieve, though in later years, she began to brood about just why She had decided to afflict the pond with burst appendix in the first place, so provoking the need for prayers. What a tricky way to induce worshipful activity.

Anyhoo, as they say in Tamworth, that time it happened while the pond was under a general anaesthetic, so who knew what was going down, but thereafter each day tended to be a bonus.

This time around the pond was fully conscious, and what's more watching the first episode of Black Mirror, a largely ignored set of one-offs made by Charlie Brooker for Channel 4 in 2011.

The pond had been astonished to read - in The New Yorker's TV pages, by esteemed if slightly batty Emily Nussbaum - this introduction, with more here, currently outside the paywall:

An update on “The Twilight Zone” for the digital age, “Black Mirror,” a dystopian drama created by Charlie Brooker for Britain’s Channel 4, has a swagger to its strangeness, a swallow-the-red-pill, anything-can-happen audacity. For a full day after watching the first episode (which I obtained through occult means, before Netflix made the show available to U.S. viewers), I felt disoriented, dropped on a new planet.

Occult means? Even in The New Yorker they know the necromantic art of the Torrent?

And boldly dare to mention it, even if in vaguely encrypted VPN style?

Disoriented, dropped on a new planet?

Well yes, indeed, because half way through the first show - incidentally by far and away the best of the series, with the rest disappointingly fair average science fiction of a peculiar English kind - the pond was being whisked away to the Royal Prince Alfred, which luckily is only ten minutes away from home.

The pond has subsequently caught up on the full episode which is very funny, in a House of Cards way, if you can substitute an image of Tony Blair or Tony Abbott for the main character. 

To quote Nussbaum again:

There has been a divisive response to the show’s first episode, “The National Anthem,” which a few viewers called, to use the worst yet most appropriate word, “ham-handed.” The plot is simple. A beloved British princess is kidnapped. The Prime Minister is woken up in the middle of the night and shown a ransom video. “What do they want?” he asks, bleary, still in his bathrobe. “Money? Release a jihadi?” After some throat-clearing, his aides hit Play. “At 4 P.M. this afternoon, Prime Minister Michael Callow must appear on live British television, on all networks, terrestrial and satellites,” the princess says, weeping as she reads the statement. “And have full, unsimulated sexual intercourse with a pig.”

Indeed. Nothing like fucking a pig for a little fun.

And the punchline (spoiler alert) is that the caper is the work of a Turner prize winner, and the deed (which has wrinkles not revealed here) is pronounced the first great art work of the twenty first century, and there lurking in the background as part of the decor during the climax to the show is the Tate Modern ...

Meanwhile, the pond was enjoying the facilities of the RPA, which, if they hadn't been to hand, would have seen the pond shouting at She for being such a poor fucking designer of things ...

It goes without saying that the pond is deeply indebted to the staff of the RPA - pity those who suffer a different fate because they're caught a long way away from the southern hemisphere's greatest teaching hospital. Oh okay, the pond has never been in the emergency ward of hospitals in South America or Africa, or for that matter anywhere else in Australia - hey, call it Stockholm syndrome if you will - but that's the way the pond felt at the time ...

It makes the pond even more irritated by the Abbott government's determination to destroy Australia's health care system, or at least to make it unaffordable to riff raff like the pond ...

Well, the pond survived, thanks to the prompt attention of the good folk at the RPA, though whether the health system in particular or Australia in general will survive the Abbott government is a matter for ongoing speculation.

As a result of the trauma, there will be a change in the pond's activities, not so much because of a long term mystical considerations but mainly through short term practicalities.

After the trauma, comes the therapy and the adjustments, and accordingly there won't be daily morning postings at the pond for some time to come. Instead, things will be intermittent and done when time and life allows ...

Many thanks to all those who posted comments expressing sympathy and concern, and links advising of the ongoing follies the pond was missing out on ...

The pond has never tried to monetise the blog - think of the guilt at infringing David Pope's intellectual property rights for mere money - so the reward has always come from the comments and the shared links and the shared sense of fun at a Pythonish world ...

What else? Well one of the observations was just what an extraordinary multicultural activity hospitals now represent, from the operating staff to those mopping the floors.

The pond wondered whether it would ever find a use for the blatant racism in this little outburst by Geoffrey Blainey in the Sydney Morning Herald back on 4th October 1984:

Ethnics in flash cars, strange cooking smells and noodles on the backyard clothesline?

What a mean, overt racist he was, the Barry Spurr of his day ...

And yet while the pond was away, there was Pauline Hanson returned from the political graveyard to explain that Islam wasn't a peaceful religion.

This while living in a country which had participated in a couple of world wards, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Iraq and Afghan wars, and sundry other minor gigs in the last hundred years. This from a country which ostensibly practices a peaceful religion like Christianity, whose highest glory is celebrated in American Sniper, what with Oz being the deputy sheriff and designated spot hitter for the southern regions ...

And then knock the pond down, if the Islamics didn't take to the streets in Sydney to explain how the slaughter of French cartoonists showed a peaceful religion doing the right thing by its Prophet... and others should shut up about an absurd religion ...

By golly, when the pond eventually gets into the antechamber with She, a few cross words will be spoken ... and it won't just be about the maltreatment of pigs on British television.

Meanwhile, here we are on Australia Day, and the pond is determined to do it in style: