In which the pond tries to ensure there's a little relief by distracting from Our Henry and the uninsurable Stutchbury ...

 

The pond wanted to open with something different, a link to the wildly irrelevant - in herpetology terms -  recent piece by Hannah Long in The Bulwark ... Randolph Scott, Virtuous Loner of the West, Lonesomeness, nobility, and anti-machismo: the ‘Ranown’ westerns are an underappreciated treasure of American cinema.

The chance that the pond and Long agree about anything, let alone everything, is vanishingly small - she says she writes about faith and she can be found in Christianity Today writing about Mission Impossible.

But she belongs in a small circle of film cognoscenti, wherein the pond also resides...with an undying affection for director Budd Boetticher and star Randolph Scott ...

It’s long past time that the Ranown cycle receive its due. But if it doesn’t—if it ends up a noble and still-unsung work of beauty—well, that would just about fit.

Long ago it was decided that women shouldn't take an interest in westerns, and it's true that in the Ranown cycle, the women are the weakest link, plot functionaries and period stereotypes, yet done without the macho nonsense of other westerns.

He (Boetticher) hated the word “macho.” He found the effect a “repulsive egotistical pain-in-the-neck.” By contrast, his own stories were “of a very strong man who had a gigantic personal problem—the death of his wife or something similar—who went out in 72 or 82 minutes to solve that problem.”

Tradition built on this tradition ...

“Budd! I stole everything from you!” Leone bellowed upon meeting Boetticher for the first time at a festival.

Part of the Tamworth tradition was that girlie boys or boyish girls - it's a mixed up, shook up world - had no right to like westerns, it was a boofhead art for boofheads, which is a bit like saying that Henry V could only be properly appreciated by Boris Johnson.

The last the pond checked Hannah was a she/hers sort of writer, obsessed with films, and nothing wrong with that ...

If you've never seen the Ranown films, and think that westerns stopped at Ford, or Hawke, or Leone, check out the adoring article and the adorable movies, where men refuse to ride around some things and Republican Randy is as remote from King Donald as the pond is from Elon Musk's Mars.

What a relief it is to find something occasionally in The Bulwark that's not about the Cantaloupe Caligula, but dammit, that brief moment back riding the range with Randy must end all too soon. 

The pond must turn to the reptile stew known as the lizard Oz, and the reptile cavortings this Tuesday ...

Ah, of course, all stops out for October 7th ...

Time to drag in the archive, for all its flaws and drop outs, so that correspondents can wander off as they like ...

OCTOBER 7 ANNIVERSARY
Haunting faces and a wellspring of hope for Israeli hostages
Israeli families mark two years since Hamas seized their loved ones, as fresh negotiations offer a glimmer of hope for the 48 hostages still held in Gaza.
By Yoni Bashan and Liam Mendes in Tel Aviv

HOSTAGE DEAL
Gaza peace talks begin, White House wants hostage deal ‘quickly’
Indirect talks have begun in Egypt between Israel and Hamas, with the US reportedly hoping for an agreement on the release of the 48 hostages finalised this week.
By Cameron Stewart

‘I promised them I’d come home’
Eli Sharabi spent 491 days as a hostage in Gaza. This is his story of survival
From weighing 44kg to learning an unthinkable truth – read this former Hamas hostage’s extraordinary account of survival in Gaza’s tunnels.
By Eli Sharabi

Not a word about Palestinians and the devastation they've suffered and the dismal future they face.

That flurry was also a handy way for the reptiles to avoid other stories, but not to worry, if you visited another place, you could cop a savvy Savva exclusive ...The meeting where Dutton and Hastie’s relationship fell apart

Just a teaser trailer:

Hastie was extremely disappointed. He saw it as Dutton asserting his dominance, on the one hand, and, on the other, making it clear he could neither trust Hastie nor empower him to do the job that he had assigned him to do.
Hastie was convinced that if Dutton had won the election, he would not have appointed him defence minister.
Dutton was hostile to Hastie, believed he had not put in the policy work and that he was lazy, but, despite all that, insists he would still have appointed him defence minister.

If you too had plunged on the lettuce, you could also read Crikey ...

The keen Keane took a view, as he always does, Watching yet *another* leader be destroyed by the Liberal right is the most tedious ritual in politics, Andrew Hastie has fled to the backbench to sit and snipe at those in his party prepared to develop a coherent policy agenda. It’s how the right works. (Should be outside the paywall)

...far easier to sit in the cheap, bacon-stained seats at RRG and snipe at those actually trying to build a policy agenda than contribute in a collegiate way via shadow cabinet — and do so knowing full well that every shot, every jibe, every foray into some shadow minister’s portfolio undermines both their colleagues and their leader.
Of course, they’re happy to support Sussan Ley for now, because they don’t have the numbers and it’s far too early in the parliamentary term. Ley only got the gig a few months back; to roll her the same year as she got the job would not exactly be the kind of thing to convince female voters to look again at the Liberal offering. But we all know where this is going. It’s now a well-established ritual, nearly to the point of kabuki: the right of the Liberals, aided and abetted by the Nationals, are willing to throw any bomb and break any rule, are happy to promise to destroy the joint if they don’t get their way, while moderates whinge and whine and leak to journalists. It’s the political equivalent of watching paint dry.
At some point, any Liberal who wants to be taken seriously is going to have to come to terms with migration and migrants. Hastie talks about being a stranger in his own home. And, yes, there’s a segment of the electorate who probably feel that way in modern Australia. They’re likely old, likely white, likely live in regional areas (where they probably don’t meet too many new arrivals) and almost certainly already vote for the Coalition or for One Nation. In the cities in which the Liberals need to be competitive again to ever have a hope of winning government, and among younger people, hostility to migration is far lower — partly because, drawbridge migrants notwithstanding, so many more people are themselves migrants.
Australia is a successful migrant nation and migrant economy, one reliant on skilled migration to address key gaps in our workforce created by an ageing population. John Howard showed how a Liberal leader — and one with a shocking record on race, no less — could oversee a high migration policy while managing the politics effectively. Appealing to RRG viewers and the party’s base on migration merely serves to ignore the Howard lesson. But wrecking and negativity are so much easier.Our fight is with Hamas, not the people of Gaza

That talk of a successful migrant nation wouldn't pass the Our Henry test (more on the old rogue later), as the pond also enjoyed this Crikey outing (paywall):

Right everyone, please take note: Andrew Hastie is not challenging Sussan Ley for leadership of the Liberal Party. Got that?
Yes, yes, I know he quit his shadow cabinet role on Friday evening after weeks of social media posting about the future direction of the party and lashing out at his colleagues. But he told us on Saturday that he supports Ley (who *checks notes* has been leader for just 5 months) and so clearly that’s that — absolutely nothing to see here.
The Nine papers said over the weekend that Hastie “quit the frontbench to free himself up and pen a manifesto on his vision to regenerate conservative politics”…
We’ve already had the back and forth over the reasons for last week’s quitting, with Ley pushing back against Hastie’s claim over who will be in charge of the Coalition’s immigration policy. The Nine report cites an MP who supports Hastie as saying the argument was “merely a convenient off-ramp for Hastie to make a move he had decided to make weeks ago”.
Someone else who has had something to say about Mr Hastie is his former boss, a certain Peter Dutton.
The Sydney Morning Herald has an eye-catching headline this morning, which declares: “Dutton: Hastie ‘went on strike’ and cost us at election”. The article is related to Dutton’s reported submissions to the Liberal Party’s 2025 election review.
A source who is apparently familiar with Dutton’s submissions is quoted by the paper as saying: “It was inconceivable to Dutton and his senior colleagues that Hastie effectively went on strike during the last term. Someone who should have been a powerful voice in the media tearing strips off Labor was absent, scared to do media, or lazy.”
The piece claims Dutton told the election review that Hastie was tasked with completing a review of how the Defence Department spent money on procurement, but that work was never finished.
It is also claimed that the submission states Hastie declined to get into a fight with Labor over matters related to the defence brief.
Unsurprisingly, Hastie has pushed back against all of that, declaring: “Only Peter Dutton and those who were in his office can explain why the defence policy was kept back until the final fortnight of the campaign.
“Of course, the reason why anonymous sources are now pushing this into the media has nothing to do with the last election. It has to do with the fact that the old guard is lashing out because it is losing the fight on immigration and energy.”
Elsewhere in opposition news, The Australian has released its latest Newspoll this morning, which suggests One Nation’s primary vote has risen to 11%, which the paper says represents its highest level since 2017.
The Coalition’s primary vote sits at 28% and Labor’s has risen to 37%.
Meanwhile, Ley’s net approval rating has fallen to minus 20.

Glorious times, and the lettuce is staying strong ....

And before moving on, the pond hopes that Freya freaks didn't miss ... ‘If Freya is the answer, we are asking the wrong question’

That header was a quote from the usual gormless "anon" source ...

The party’s ongoing promotion of Leach and her views, is causing deep ructions among sections of the Liberals who fear the party will remain unelectable unless it dramatically changes. Those changes include reflecting modern Australia.

“If Freya is the answer, we are asking the wrong question,” one long-term Liberal operative said.

“The party and the base gravitate towards her because she is the only young person who tells them that the party doesn’t have to change. She continues to provide validation to the views held in the party which have repeatedly demonstrated through multiple election reviews are the cause of the collapse in the primary vote.”

But Freaky Freya has top notch company, no less than dashing Donners...

Leach campaigned alongside another darling of the conservatives during the Voice campaign, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, calling the Northern Territory senator “the Queen” and this month Leach will headline a Liberal fundraiser on Sydney’s northern beaches, once the party’s heartland until the teal takeover.

The theme is “wokeness in education, and the best ways to counter its influence” and Leach will be joined by academic Kevin Donnelly, who describes himself as one of “Australia’s leading conservative public intellectuals and cultural warriors”.

By golly, dashing Donners has gone up in his own esteem, and has now promoted himself to the status of cultural warrior par excellence.

Can a stint working for Pete Hegseth or perhaps a gig at the next Riyadh comedy festival be far behind?

And now after that droll detour, maestro, drum roll and trumpet blast, so that expectations can be raised, only to be shattered, and it's over to the extreme far right to see who's top of the world, ma:

At last there was a mention of Palestinian people, by the Ambassador no less ...

Our fight is with Hamas, not the people of Gaza
Israel wants a future in which Israelis and Palestinians alike can live with dignity and security. If Hamas surrenders both its weapons and its ideology, there is hope.
By Amir Maimon

Could have fooled the pond, sure looked like a dinkum bout of ethnic cleansing.

Alas and alack, instead of mealy mouthed platitudes, it was Our Henry who was actually top of the world this day, and the pond decided this rare Tuesday outing was best off in the archive cornfield ...

What happened to mateship with tolerance for all?
Australia’s Jewish community faces unprecedented security threats, as attacks on synagogues and schools shatter two centuries of religious tolerance.
By Henry Ergas
Columnist

Our Henry played the Holocaust card, made obvious in the archived header,  Holocaust survivors watch history repeat in Australia.

No, he's not scribbling about the slaughter of Aboriginal people, in his fevered imagination there's a current Holocaust of Jews going down right here, right now ...

That's the ultimate card, so all the pond could do was offer highlights when Our Henry dropped into his famous referential mode:

Arendt (ignoring all else Arendt wrote about Israel):

Nothing better captures those echoes than Hannah Arendt’s reflections on her generation’s experience in the 1930s. They had, she wrote, been brought up in the belief that “moral conduct is a matter of course”, as are everyday tolerance and ordinary civility.
But without notice, “all this collapsed almost overnight and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed as just a set of mores, customs and manners which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people”.
Unexpectedly, a corner of daily life had “curled up, and there was a glimpse of the lining”. Once that happened, “all the certainties were gone,” swept away with “the ground under our feet”.

(Want an alternative? Try On Arendt: Creating a Zionism That Owns Its Mistakes

“Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people. Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of a Jewish homeland.” (Arendt, 397)).

Bible (for those liable to believe what they read in the Bible):

From Abraham’s departures for Canaan and beyond, through the Israelites’ extended wanderings in the wilderness, to the promise of home conveyed near the end of Deuteronomy but then promptly overwhelmed by the threat of renewed homelessness, the experience of being cast into exile is at the heart of Jewish memory.
“Among the nations shall you have no repose,” warns Deuteronomy; “and your life shall hang in doubt before you; and you shall fear night and day”.
Today’s security, and the confidence of a life for you, your children and grandchildren, may crumble before your eyes – as it did, at least once every century, in a trail that stretched from the mass expulsions of the 13th century through to the death camps and killing fields of World War II.
But despite the tragedy of recurring homelessness, the Jewish story was never only one of rejection and flight. Rather, each and every time, hope was reborn, and new life rekindled, at the very edge of the abyss of despair.
“Build houses and dwell in them, plant gardens and eat the fruit of them; take wives and beget sons and daughters and multiply there and be not diminished,” Jeremiah had counselled the exiles in Babylon. And at each stop along history’s trail of dislocation new communities were built where even in exile Jews could sustain a national existence. Fortified by the strength of tradition, they established communal institutions, developed an impressive system of laws, found paths to prosperity, ensured the transmission of the faith and produced a vast body of scholarship.
Those efforts were not for the benefit of Jews alone. Isaac, the Bible tells us, overcame the envy and hatred of his hosts by proving his usefulness: a story pondered by later generations who saw in the narratives of their ancestors “a sign for the children”. It was in that story’s light that they interpreted Jeremiah’s instruction to always “seek the peace of the city to which I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall you have peace”.

Frost:

“Home” for Jews wasn’t, in Robert Frost’s famous phrase, “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”; it was a sanctuary that had to be earned and then earned again through hard work, bold innovation, intellectual creativity, and against-the-odds survival.

History:

Nowhere did the opportunity to make that contribution seem greater and more assured than in Australia. Freedom could hardly have come in a less likely setting: a convict colony at the end of the world. Nor were the signs, when a handful of Jewish convicts arrived with the First Fleet in January 1788, at all propitious.
Having been brutally expelled from England in 1290, it was only in 1655 that a few Jews were granted legal residence.
Yes, the Glorious Revolution inaugurated an era more tolerant of difference and more respectful of rights. But when the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753 was proposed to parliament and passed with little opposition, mass protests broke out, with a leading opponent asserting that legal recognition of Jewish rights was “as great an affront as we could well put upon our established Church”.
With that legislation being hastily repealed, the cause of Jewish emancipation was durably set back, and it was only in 1858 that Jewish political equality was achieved. The first Jews to arrive in this distant land therefore had every reason to fear the treatment they would receive.
But the newly established colony marched to its own drum. So as to encourage commercial development in the British Empire, the Plantation Act of 1740 had allowed Jews in the Americas to gain the rights of British subjects. Interpreting that legislation generously, successive governors of the Australian colonies ensured that Jews enjoyed the same rights as their Christian counterparts.
As a result, Jews were free from the legal discrimination they still suffered in the mother country: they acquired British nationality, voted at elections, held commissions in the local militia, were elected to municipal offices, and were appointed justices of the peace.
There was, however, an exception. In 1836, governor Richard Bourke, an Irish Protestant and lifelong liberal, decided that if there were to be established churches, all the great divisions of Christianity, and not just the ­Anglicans, should be established, and funded equally.
But the Colonial Office prohibited him from extending that funding to the synagogues of the fledgling Jewish community.

DH Lawrence and Hume:

Tracking their experience, sociologist PW Medding described their reception as one of “qualified acceptance” – the “indifference which is not apathy” DH Lawrence had portrayed as quintessentially Australian. “Australians did not especially like ‘foreigners’”, one Holocaust survivor told Medding, “but they disliked drawing attention to themselves by being nasty to people even more”.
However, the important thing, the recent arrivals soon learnt, was that the barriers melted with time, helped by the respect Australians had for those who helped themselves and who did so much to build, strengthen and enrich this country. But never and nowhere has toleration come easily or been easy to sustain. David Hume called it an “artificial” virtue that struggles against mankind’s natural inclinations.

A final Manning Clark flourish:

Looking back in 1955 on the early European settlers’ dreams, Manning Clark concluded the introduction to his Select Documents in Australian History with these words: “So we leave them, dumbfounded at their optimism, astounded that belief in material progress and mateship could be their only comforters against earth and sky, man and beast.”

Oh and a bit of praise for his country, a retort to the keen Keane carrying on about being a successful migrant country:

...the crippling flaws of a multiculturalism that is one part what holds us together, nine parts what drives us apart; the intellectual vacuity of political, cultural and educational elites who, when the chips are down, lack the moral courage to take a stance; the fragility, in the end, of what we had always taken to be the Australian project.

Well there's always Israel to head to, if we're to accept the logic of the love it or leave it mob that dwell in the lizard Oz...

Why does he stay, and load is up with all those references, when paradise awaits?

Or does he like to see all those car wrecks?

That was a bit strained, but the pond liked it all the same.

Meanwhile the pond wanted to set the scene for a final stitching up with Stutchbury ...with this story, Extreme weather costs Australia more than any other rich country, bar one

Over at the ABC they helped with a graph, as the ABC is wont to do ...

If you wanted the report itself, you could head off to the news release ...Extreme weather costs: the silver medal we don’t want, with a direct link to a pdf of the report.

All that nicely sets the scene for a session of sucking it up with Stutchbury ....

The header: Why the renewables romance could be headed for divorce, Most Australians support net zero by 2050. But the hidden cost of this will start to bite as the renewables honeymoon ends.

The tedious caption for yet another terrifying snap of towers and wires and the whole damn thing: As renewables’ share of the energy generation grows, those storage and grid costs rise steeply. Picture: AFP

What is it with the "could be"? "Could be headed for a divorce"?

Shouldn't the Stutch be scribbling about how they've just left Reno?

Why the saucy doubts and fears, the cunning little out clause in the header, when the Stutch is Hayeking all the way to the end times?

Friedrich Hayek famously said the task of economics includes exposing the fatal conceit of those who insist on planning how the world will work.
In Australia, he would have pointed to the National Broadband Network, which promised higher productivity but had to be written down by $31bn to deliver accounting returns to keep it off budget. Or the union-pushed Gonski school funding that splurged tens of billions but failed to halt the alarming slide in student learning. And the $52bn National Disability Insurance Scheme that some said would pay for itself but now costs three times more than initial estimates.
Now there’s another conceit: the plan to cut Australia’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 – relying overwhelmingly on wind and solar – as our contribution to the international effort to curb global warming. It was always going to be a massive task to decarbonise Australia’s fossil fuel-intensive economy, because we built our prosperity on cheap coal and gas.
As Ross Garnaut has warned, it’s highly unlikely we will get close to either the federal government’s interim 2030 target or its new goal of cutting carbon emissions by 62-70 per cent by 2035. And equally unlikely that Australia – or China, the US, India or Russia – will cut their emissions to net zero in the next 25 years. But the bigger conceit is believing that trying to do so will drive down costs and power bills.

Yes, we've been here before may times, and just look at the terrifying image the reptiles lined up for priceless time with petulant Peta ... CIS Director of Energy Research Aidan Morrison explains a new report from the Centre of Independent Studies, which suggests Australia has passed the point where renewable energy can deliver 'easy' gains to the system. “The thing I wanted to emphasise with energy sources that you can’t control, that come from the wind and sun, they come in rushes and gushes, and that actually means that unlike other generators, it gets harder to add more and more to the system.” Mr Morrison told Sky News host Peta Credlin. “Our energy prices have started rising in the last few years because of this effect, and are going to rise a whole lot further and faster. “Around about 20 per cent is when we saw the first signs, and 30 per cent, the honeymoon is well and truly over, and it only gets harder from here. “There's no one that’s trying to do what we are trying to do and not having huge amounts of price pain at the moment.”

Is it possible to insure against brain damage caused by endlessly reading renewables doomsaying in the lizard Oz? 

Possibly not, what with the surge in prices and the relentless over-exposure...

Anthony Albanese insisted before the 2022 election that Labor’s renewables plan would cut household energy bills by $275 a year. “I don’t think, I know,” he said. “I know because we have done the modelling.” Instead, the opposite has happened. Power costs have gone up. And Australia is losing its cheap energy advantage as it relies more on renewable energy.
Amid the febrile climate wars, it is critical that the public debate understands why. The CIS energy team has provided the best explanation to date in its new paper, The Renewable Energy Honeymoon: starting is easy, the rest is hard.
Yes, an isolated kilowatt hour of energy from the sun or the wind may be cheaper to generate than power from coal, gas or uranium. The sun shines for free. The wind blows at no cost. But it’s a different equation for an electricity grid required to operate 24/7 across eastern and central Australia, including when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
As the paper’s lead author, Zoe Hilton, points out, solar and wind are intermittent; so the energy they supply comes in bursts. Sometimes this supply is too much, other times too little. Hence, solar and wind energy has to be shifted across time (by being stored) and across space (through transmission lines). Significant amounts of energy are wasted along the way. And as renewables’ share of the energy generation grows, those storage and grid costs rise steeply, because as the easier options are used up, storing and moving energy become more difficult.
More storage means holding power for longer periods, and real weather patterns eventually require multi-day or seasonal storage. This reduces how often storage is used and makes each unit of energy more expensive.
The same is true for transmission: once nearby demand is met, electricity must travel further, which increases the need for costly new infrastructure. Further, since 2019-2020, oversupply has cut renewable revenues, leaving new projects dependent on subsidies. Government schemes mask this pressure, but the fundamentals remain: the more renewables added, the less each contributes and the more it costs.
The costs involved turn out to be massive, and get passed on to end users or taxpayers. A similar pattern shows up around the world when you plot wind and solar generation on the horizontal axis and the price of power on the vertical axis. The trend line rises upward to the right at about 45 degrees.
Countries with 20 per cent or so penetration tend to have moderate power prices. Those with 20-33 per cent wind and solar penetration, such as Australia, have higher prices. And the prices are higher still for countries where solar and wind exceeds a third of electricity generation, such as Spain, Portugal, Germany and Denmark.
Germany is now pulling back from its renewables ambitions as higher energy prices undermine its industrial base. But the Climate Change Authority projects that renewable energy will account for more than 90 per cent of Australia’s electricity supply by 2030. That suggests the end of the renewables honeymoon could be headed for the divorce courts. It will get harder, not easier, from here.

The reptiles came along with a graphic of their own, a right royal mess ... Renewables graphic for the web

What a flurry of dot point floozies.

Put it another way, please allow the pond to do climate science the reptile way ... by deploying an ancient poem ...

To be fair, that scrambled eggs graph is at one with the Stutch, trying to stitch it all up in a last burst ...

Labor has covered up the problem of higher energy prices with household power bill handouts, secretive taxpayer underwriting of new solar and wind projects, and subsidies to stop energy-hungry old steelworks and smelters from closing.
We’re heading back to subsidising industries because Labor won’t want high power prices to be blamed for shutting down these factories and losing jobs. Remember, the clean-energy transition was supposed to result in less emissions, lower prices and more jobs.
Most Australians support net zero by 2050. But the hidden cost of this will start to bite as the renewables honeymoon ends.
The clash between the strong public support for net zero and the rising costs of energy shows up in Australia’s scrappy climate wars.
The Liberal and National parties are going through a civil war over whether to keep supporting net zero by 2050. Labor is content to allow the Coalition to tear itself apart over net zero while cloaking the problem with more borrowed money.
The clash will require a new political bargain that discards the conceit of the “renewables free lunch”. This could include not ruling out zero-emissions nuclear power to supply reliable zero-emissions energy.
A new political bargain would end the passive-aggressive bans and restrictions on supplying lower-emissions gas that is needed to help firm up renewables.
And it could extend to relying more on a revenue-neutral carbon price that could tax the so-called negative externality of carbon emissions while cutting other taxes to incentivise economic growth. Or, as Hayek would say, let’s rely more on the market, rather than the conceit of politicians and planners, if we want to discover the least-cost path to a lower-emissions world.

Credit where credit is due ...

Michael Stutchbury is executive director at the Centre for Independent Studies.

Finally the pond is aware that in all the above, there were so many distractions that the bromancer ranting about everything went missing.

The pond decided his rant about the abject state of the world was best left to a late arvo slot, but those impatient for a bromancer fix can head off to the archive cornfield, and inject the heady brew straight into the eyeball ...

Reality not part of PM’s foreign policy playbook
How dare Anthony Albanese claim some credit in helping with Trump’s peace plan – Australia’s move to recognise Palestinian statehood made Hamas less likely to accept any ceasefire.
By Greg Sheridan

Perhaps the archive isn't working, perhaps correspondents haven't been able to insure against the guaranteed misery of the read ... 

Whatever, fear not, there will be a late arvo chance to catch up.

And, so for the moment, it's time to wrap up with the immortal Rowe ...