Oz-Struck

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Meeting a kangaroo isn't like looking at an animal in a zoo - it's an encounter with a creature literally hopping with personality. Australia seems filled not with animals, but with species radically different to homo sapiens who have the individuality, intelligence and bounce of a Narnian character.



I was expecting an arid country, but instead found a Lewis Carroll world of gleaming and swirling trees where life flourished.

Black swans, dingos, koalas...



An irresistible wombat...

And hills over which red parrots soar.

This is a winter morning in the Barossa. Sharp skies and primary colours.

You may have heard of this babbling brook, known locally as Jacob's Creek.

It's a nation defined by expanse. Miles of sea stretch out to Antarctica from Adelaide's pier.

And almost as great a distance of apparent emptiness rolls out from Alice Springs in ever direction.

But this is land which changes like a symphony. Red dirt flashes into purples and yellows. Green scrub shoots up and camels and wild horses cross your path.

And everywhere there are works of epic sculpture.



It is like exploring Mars, but with clear, sweet air.



And as far as I know, it is not possible to find a piano-playing dingo on the red planet. But you can in the Red Centre.

And from the bed of a dry river in this scorched land comes something which somehow refreshes the soul. It's another side of the world.

Walking and Barking

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I never thought of my family as a dog-walking family. Definitely not a two-dog-walking family. And certainly not a three-dog-walking family.



But that's exactly what's happened.



A tricolour pack just waiting to be put together.



Are the best changes ones which we would never have predicted?

The Salt Merchants' Desert Library

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Friendship, politics and time travel

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Time travel is already here – you can watch it take place if you go to a wedding this summer.

The definition of friendship is when you greet someone you haven’t seen for years but with whom, within minutes of meeting again, you instantly fall back into a rhythm of joshing and japing .

Such camaraderie makes time elastic. It’s what stretches between the crises, plans, achievements, milestones and fiascoes which fill life, and is one of the glories of humanity.

With the right music, it’s possible to jump from reminiscing about old times to actually experiencing them again.

I was at a splendid wedding in the Midlands a few weeks’ ago when the digital jukebox started playing uproarious tunes from the days before Jarvis Cocker grew a beard. We were soon jumping around like otters with a gleeful abandon our ligaments hadn’t experienced for close to a decade.

This is more than nostalgia. Such happiness not only refreshes memories, but it reintroduces us to dreams which once burned.

No matter how confused modern France may be as globalisation bubbles through Europe, it must be extraordinarily hard for even the most cynical Gaul to sing La Marseillaise and not be stirred by the Technicolor of the founding dream:

What does this horde of slaves,
Of traitors and conspiring kings want?
For whom are these vile chains,
These long-prepared irons?

But just as music and great company can shine a light on the past and instantly pick out the diamonds buried there, what is exciting is that these rays of illumination can stretch into the future.

After watching an episode of the West Wing I used to hum with a neutron glow of optimism. The White House presented in Aaron Sorkin’s televisual masterpiece bore no resemblance to the crisis-bedraggled administration in power at the time, but this vision of politics showed how idealism and virtue could still somehow exist in the 21st century, even if such notions are carried in the cracked earthenware vessels all of us are.

In fact, art, even when it acknowledges our darkest failings, allows us to see hope on a horizon for the act of creation is the summoning of something out of nothing.

As the graphic novelist Alan Moore recently said: “Ideas start out in the empty void of your head – and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.”

With institutions crumbling across Britain there is the potential for a moment of springtime. And the work of building a better society rooted in the best of the past is a reward in itself.

Žižek's Castle

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The Castle Overlooking the Canyon

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The Castle on the Glacier

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The Castle on the Lagoon

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The Home of the Surrealist and His Manager

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The Eton Rifles v. the Texan Cowboys

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In one of the most famous lines of music journalism, John Landau wrote in 1974: “I have seen the future of rock and roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen.”

If the Conservatives triumph at the polls in the looming general election, expect at least one American pundit to declare: “I have seen the future of right-of-centre politics, and his name is David Cameron.”

Springsteen was a musician who seemed comfortable in his skin as a blue-collar songsmith with a story to tell. Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne – among others – make no effort to hide their blue blood credentials and are happy to advocate a chilled-out Conservatism.

This contrasts with the identity crisis in which the US Republican party is locked.

Throughout the most recent Bush presidency, the party sought to submerge its aristocratic heritage.

British Conservatives also attempted to torch their party’s image as a bastion of privilege in the wake of their 1997 catastrophe. William Hague boasted of his comprehensive education, Iain Duncan-Smith shared his experiences of unemployment, and Michael Howard fought a nakedly populist election campaign in 2005.

Conservatives then decided to embrace the fact that they have politicians who have enjoyed the finest education money can buy. Rather than attempt to accumulate street-cred, they have recognised swathes of Brits are enchanted by the vision of Albion presented in the Boden catalogue and like the idea of a politician who is fluent in Latin; London’s mayor revels in his image as a freewheeling brainbox.

In contrast, the Republicans have made anti-intellectualism a virtue – and potentially alienated the legions of Americans who have toiled for a feverishly expensive degree.

George W Bush is a product of Phillips Academy, (Massachusetts’s answer to Eton), Yale and Harvard. However, the party persistently attempted to portray Democrat rivals as preening elitists.

This has led to a situation where hollering demagogues such as talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh and Alaska’s homespinning enigma Sarah Palin enjoy a dominance in the party which will delight zealots but baffle many mainstream voters.

Democrat Barack Obama glided to the White House by speaking softly and doing nothing to disguise his intelligence. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum is on a mission to forge a thinking person’s Republicanism through his New Majority initiative – but the party seems destined for a brutal battle for its soul.

Tories used to wistfully look at Ronald Reagan as proof that a fiscal conservative could charm and excite millions. But today’s Republicans will stare in astonished fascination at the spectacle of a Tory victory in which voters embrace men and women who look like they were bred to lead.

If Republicans celebrate education, defend the passing of prosperity between generations, and furiously tack to the political centre, this will be a strategy born in the UK.

The House of Masquerade Nights

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The Big Old House Built On Love

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The Cartographer's Castle

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New Politics

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Ross Douthat sees in Pope Benedict's latest encyclical on social justice and global economics a political vision which transcends Left and Right. It inspires him to long for greater freedom to form and follow convictions:

Why should being pro-environment preclude being pro-life? Why can’t Republicans worry about economic inequality, and Democrats consider devolving more power to localities and states? Does opposing the Iraq war mean that you have to endorse an anything-goes approach to bioethics? Does supporting free trade require supporting the death penalty?

These questions, and many others like them, are the kind that a healthy political system would allow voters and politicians to explore.

But for now, at least, you’re more likely to find them being raised in Benedict XVI’s Vatican than in Barack Obama’s Washington.

Reaching for the Stars

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One of the many remarkable aspects of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon is that it was launched just 40 years ago today.

Children in British schools are taught to look far back in history – way beyond the lifetimes of their grandparents – for examples of great adventures.

Shakespeare left this world in 1616, Magellan sailed for another shore in 1521... But Neil Armstrong, the first man in human history to walk on the moon, is living quietly and shunning publicity.

When we watch the grainy footage of the moon landings, see the images of the men in white shirts at ground control, and hear the jubilation which swept so many corners of the planet at this achievement, all of it seems from another time.

It was an era when the spirits of science and adventure danced and took humanity beyond the boundaries of what earlier ages thought possible.

Could so profoundly expensive a project be justified today?

Now, we use vast sums of money to keep banks afloat – not to send men on missions of epic discovery which would make Sir Francis Drake gyrate.

The most advanced hardware is not use to propel capsules to the further reaches of the solar system but to guide bombs to the homes of our enemies (which, judging by the regular reports of civilians in Afghanistan who are fired at by unmanned devices, is a technology very far from perfection).

It is true Nasa’s exploits were powered by Cold War rivalry with Russia as much as propulsion rockets, yet space flight reveals a glimpse of the Earth in which the lines we draw on maps do not exist. It was this sight of our blue and green world which kick-started the modern environmental movement, but recent decades seem dominated by distractions from the pursuit of common progress.

It is a grim irony that 30 years ago today Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq. The West would spend considerable time and effort supporting him in a war against his neighbouring Islamic republic before invading Iraq twice.

President Richard Nixon, who congratulated the astronauts on their return, would become enmeshed in the Watergate scandal and America’s cultural and political divides would rupture into gapping fissures in the subsequent decades.

If China does plough money into its own space programme we can expect the United States to rekindle lunar and Martian ambitions.

President Obama is understood to be fan of space exploration. He also sees it as a personal mission to unite his nation and transform America’s image abroad.

There are probably wiser ways to spend cash in an era of austerity – and disease and poverty are there to be battled – but it would be an incredible thing to see a human to walk on Mars. It would prove we can still make history.

Chasing Utopia

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Europeans and Americans alike are baffled by the British for different reasons.

To our neighbours on the continent next door, we must seem like the kids who decline to take part in the sack race on and instead play with yo-yos on the sidelines.

We don’t rush to join the euro – which to some eyes dazzles as a glittering expression of European might and identity – and instead send politicians to the Brussels parliament who believe the entire EU project stinks like 36-month-old brie.

Meanwhile, Americans blink in bewilderment at the raucous pummelling of the Prime Minister which takes place in the House of Commons each week, regardless of which party is in power. Rather than seeing the country’s top political leader as a public servant anointed by the hand of destiny for honour at this hour, our MPs routinely act as if he or she is responsible for the Bermuda Triangle.

Our cousins across both the channel and the Atlantic might conclude we are an anarchic people best left undisturbed.

But perhaps the true difference is that we are not trained to believe utopia is imminent. Our national anthem is an appeal for good things to be showered upon a hereditary monarch – plus a reference to doing something unspeakable to the Scots – and contrasts with the sense of messianic purpose flowing through French and American culture.

If Cromwell had founded a durable democratic republic, it is possible we might share such a sense of our importance to the planet. But while children in the US and France are educated to delight in the virtues of their respective constitutions, we are trained to muddle along for another generation and to avoid anything as silly as building an empire again.

But is this all about to change in Wales, Scotland and maybe even Northern Ireland?

The Welsh referendum was passed by the whisker of a translucent cat. Yet it resulted in the foundation of an Assembly filled with men and women elected according to the will of people who are increasingly considered to constitute a bona fide nation.

Even those who regard outright independence as bonkers are coming round to the idea that this institution is the place where more laws should be made.

And as the idea seeps in that the Assembly could serve us better than Westminster does today, the concept that a better Wales is possible may take root. We may start looking to the future with optimism.

Is it possible for each generation to bequeath to the next a better society than the one it inherited? Such a notion underpins American public life and drives the EU – will it catch on in the devolved administrations?

We have a cash-strapped Assembly charged with managing a battered post-industrial economy. But as confidence grows, soon we may be rich in hope.

Jonny and Heather's Wedding

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Jonny Mayner was a founding member of Deep and Meaningful Productions, an Aberdeen experiment in cosmic drama which brought glee into many a dark Scottish night. He was a chief source of joy to scores of people in those undergraduate days, and there was a grand gathering of friends this weekend to celebrate his marriage to the stunningly fantastic Heather.



Walt Whitman, DH Lawrence and REM all made appearances during the ceremony. The true stars were the couple at the front.



It was also a rare opportunity for a tribe who first met when the comet Hale-Bopp was in the sky to reconvene.



Anarchic energy has not been sapped in the slightest.



And Ethan is living proof of one of the most exciting creative projects.



He's a Zen master and he hasn't even started school. If fact, if he started a school I'd sign up.



There were high times and not too many misdemeanours as the night rolled on, which made the chill-out the next morning sublime.

Don't Stop the Beat

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In his death seven days ago, Michael Jackson launched one of the greatest sensations of his career.

It constitutes a comeback of triumphant proportions. His finest music videos are playing on multiple channels simultaneously, his albums are back at the top of the charts, and fulsome eulogies have been trumpeted around the world.

The sordid speculation which stalked him for years is suspended and instead he is acknowledged as perhaps the greatest African-American musician since Chuck Berry and the most mesmerising dancer since Fred Astaire.

His death triggered an affirmation of his talent and restoration of his commercial success which could never have been accomplished through a 50-gig performance.

For a man whose public persona and art were inseparable, his demise was the closing moment in a narrative which began when he stepped onto a stage with his brothers in 1964.

It was Aristotle who insisted that for a story to compel it needed a beginning, a middle and an end. And in the centuries since, young talents have turned their lives into tales of tragic grandeur in which each element is played out first on the stage and then in the obituary column.

Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain all perished at 27. There can be a dark romance about the early passing of young genius if it echoes the exits of Keats (25), Shelley (29) and Byron (36).

But the spectacles of pop stars perishing in lonely self-destruction has no true glory. It is not the climax of their art but the extinguishing of their gift.

Rock music at its best is a life-affirming art form in which electricity is channelled through amplifiers in a celebration of being alive at this moment in time. A great concert is a moment of communion in which human hopes and fears are confronted and embraced in music.

U2’s Bono recently asserted it was time to shut down the death cult which has dragged performers off the stage too soon.

Novelist Philip Roth, 76, enjoyed pop icon levels of fame in the 1960s with his taboo-shredding bestsellers. But his three greatest novels were written between 1998 and 2004 – and at least two more books are on the way.

We need grand musicians who can live this long, work this long, and chronicle and create with such diligence and genius. This is a true life’s work.

Unlike architects whose actual lives are distinct from their brick and stone creations, musicians need to haul their flesh and blood bodies into the limelight. Performance is a public craft.

But as the bizarre and sad mysteries which surround Michael Jackson demonstrate, even though we can be moved and thrilled by the magic singers conjure, we have no true access into their private world of agonies and aspirations, nor should we. If we cherish their art, we should respect their frailty.