Coffee Culture

 Sometimes it's not about the waves.

Today Wonder

every day has wonder, 

you just have to 

put in the effort

to look hard, 

to listen hard 

and to smile soft

Today Wonder

is also a song

by the former Saints guitarist

Ed Kuepper

the other Bowie

Bowie Pollard sneaking in a cheater 5 at Little Cove

Style (waiting for Ita)

Nana Brine's house sits 50 meters from the high tide mark, where the rain is driving horizontally and little bits of frothy foam are blowing across the soaked sand, tumbling over a thick line of pumice stone, bird feathers and tangled pieces of seaweed, freshly ejected by the ocean. A cyclone is coming, but the choppy waves are still small and chaotic.

Nana Brine's house will never feature in one of those glossy Home Style type of magazines, but she doesn't care. She has her own style accumulated from 90 odd years of savouring the sights and sounds and tastes of the planet - Accidentally Retro. The 1970's cups and plates and clothes still function, so why throw them out? 

Nana Brine's house has withstood the onslaught of many thunderous weather events (and the odd debate about politics). It's 70's style wood panelling suits the enlargements on the wall of places visited last century and the collages of her children and their children and their children. Her garden is vital to her health and happiness - azaleas, hibiscus, New Zealand Christmas bush and all manner of veges and  the 30-year-veteran lemon tree in the back corner that she's loath to prune lest she jinx it's productivity.

Nana Brine's house exudes the soaked up memories and the laughter of a home lived in by the same clan for a long time. When she walks her country, she recalls the stories of those who went before her, remembering that style is more something you grow into rather than something you can buy from a shop and climb into or in her words "whack on".

Nana Brine's house shakes from the winds. An eerie whining sound in the wires is punctuated by a lone long blast of foghorn from one of the massive tankers anchored off the beach. But Nana doesn't notice. Her hearing isn't what it used to be. She asks me to make her "a cuppa" while the  fella on the national radio asks listeners if the pension age should be raised to 70 and Cyclone Ita creeps closer.

Palm Sunday Squall

The Pocket

Found $9 which had been rattling around the pocket of my boar dies for the last nine surfs!
Epic, including a slide with Huon and his Bing Elevator in fairly ordinary surf this morning - but fun nonetheless.

If Lenin surfed

If Lenin surfed, he would probably wave to his salty comrades while gliding on his log as demonstrated here by Noosa Mal Club elder,  Mick Henderson. No idea whether there would be a revolution or not though.
Maybe he'd argue for surfers to give up the shackles of commercially dependent product and embrace the purity of body surfing.

Monochrome Monday (down to the sea again)

 Some salty snippets of memories and verse

 for my siblings of the sea and assorted lurkers.

"I must down to the seas again, 

for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call 

that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day 

with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, 

and the sea-gulls crying."

John Masefield, Sea Fever: Selected Poems

Tie Dye Pat

Pat Saunders logging some classic tie dye at Johnno's.

The Festival - Part 1

Couple of snippets

Wollongbar

Today's post is for all the walking wounded who are starting the working week already wrecked.

Today's image is what you get when you take $5K worth of camera equipment out at the wreck site of the Wollongbar at Byron Bay on a flat day, process the 100Mb image down to a1M jpeg, send it to your phone and processs that on a free app, then email it to yourself to process again in photoshop. Easy.

From Batman to Gathman

The other day I watched my nephew introducing his son to bodysurfing. 

The way the little fella was clinging to his dad's shoulders as they soared towards the shore whooping and laughing took me back to Kirra last century and my own dad teaching me about the ocean's pulses and rhythms and dangers - the same ocean where land and time and responsibility and mortgage payments and deadlines end, an an endless playground oblivious and disinterested in our macho machinations and digital dreamings. 

Where analogue starts.

Where generations and memories blur.

Where the Stoke is maintained.

Later, while we all talked story, the little fella and his little brother exchanged surf clobber for Action Hero outfits, oblivious to time, the heat and the rest of us smiling on. 

One day you're rocking the Batman mask and before you can say "Holy drop in, Batman" you're rocking the Gath helmet in full water person style and a couple of decades have evaporated.