This post marks the end of the longest gap in my blogging efforts since I started. I've been away from a PC most of the time. Contents in this post will include:

1) My trip
2) Things I've read and watched
3) Ideas (but not many of those)

The trip was a three week visit to Australia on the back of my partner having to go there with work.

The work visit was to a Queensland town called Toowoomba but I didn't get to go there. Instead I had three days to entertain myself in Brisbane (more work for partner) and a fortnight staying on the Queensland coast about 200-250 miles north of Brisbane.

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, we don't tend to move around a lot on our usual holidays; a small Scottish island being the destination we go for most often. Faced with an opportunity to visit somewhere as large as Australia put us in a quandary - should we go for a touring type of holiday or try to replicate the kind of mooching about in one location vacation that we're used to.

In the end we decided on the latter. I'm glad that we did because it was so relaxing but obviously I can't compare it with the kind of holiday we didn't take.

However, I am glad of the time in Brisbane. We were staying near the City Hall. Brisbane is very user friendly (and friendly) and particularly good for parks and gardens. The place looks good, particularly at night. I also had a one day stopover in Singapore. I'd like to go back to both places.

Though we believed we benefited from basing ourselves in one place, we hadn't quite allowed for how hot it would be in the middle of the day. So, a touring holiday (in an air-conditioned vehicle) with plenty of time to look around at the end of each day and the beginning of the next makes very good sense.

The highlight of the holiday was a day's excursion to Lady Musgrave Island and snorkelling around the coral reef, colourful fish and green turtles. Other enjoyable activities included a trip around the harbour where we were staying in a one-time light amphibious re-supply craft, a trip to the Awoonga high dam and taking in the Glass House Mountains on our way back to Brisbane to fly home. Just driving around was enjoyable because of the sense of space. Everywhere was much greener than I'd been expecting but I think that was because they'd recently had much more rain than they'd been expecting. One morning we took a drive around a spacious residential area to watch the kangaroos having breakfast.

I hope to be able to post a picture or two of where we've been in a few days' time.

Although effective measures to protect the coastal scenery seem to be in place, there's no doubt that Queensland is in the middle of a real estate boom. Some of the newest developments look pretentious even though they presumably incorporate a lot of good features for keeping interior temperature levels down.

====================================================

while I've been away I've read Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search for Meaning'. Although this is a terrible story (about his time as a slave worker in WWll) it does the job of illustrating the point he's making supremely well. I've also read part of Stella Rimington's 'Open Secret', which is an excellent read.

On a lighter note, I've enjoyed reading 'The Welsh Girl' by Peter Ho Davies, which is thought provoking and the even lighter, 'Detective Inspector Huss' which is a particularly good Swedish police procedural.

We watched the dvd of 'Amazing Grace' while we were away. This was good on several counts and the timescale was 'concertina'd' quite cleverly. We also watched 'Romulus, My Father', whihc has made me want to find out more about Raimond Gaitu.

====================================================

Australia's economy seems to be doing just fine for the time being so while away it felt as if I was looking at the looming recession from the outside. the only part of the Australian scene that wasn't prospering was the stock market, which seemed to be suffering from over-leveraged foreigners selling up.

International press wasn't available where we were staying but what I've read in the last few days gives the impression that buy-out of Bear Stearns and the other financial woes has left commentators stunned; not a time to be prophesying new dawns in the investment industry.

In fact, it's beginning to look as if international finance is more seriously discredited now than at any time since the 1930s even though the balance of opinion seems to be that things are not going to get as bad as they did then. Ideas I've read for investing mention infrastructure and agriculture but I wonder if we might seeing these sectors prospering but in such a way that investors don't get as much of 'look in' as they might have hoped.

The spirit of the times is changing. Who knows; instead of the specious recommendations of slickers, it might be an age for people to shut themselves away from the clamour of get-rich-quick ideas and be creative in other ways?

===================================================

On the way back from Singapore last week, I had a window seat and it was a pretty clear day so I had plenty of time to study the terrain of peninsular Malaysia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan.

====================================================

Back to regular posting and post reading.