Paying Ready Attention

It was, apparently, a Webber B fracture.   If it had not been for the fact that my ankle was hurting, I would have only been able to guess what part of my body that referred to.   In a disarming act of honesty, my GP admitted the same thing.   Dr. Google soon provided a more detailed answer. If you looked at the X-Ray you could see a faint line, running across most of the bone, just up from the base of my left fibula.   But you had to look really, really hard.   It did not occur to me at the time to ask if this counted as a broken ankle.   Was it just a cracked bone?   And is a cracked bone a broken ankle? How much of a break does it need to be before it counts as a real break?   I remain ignorant on this issue. I had been running back from dinner with H, racing Sal and P back to the room.   A classic “it seemed like a good idea at the time” sort of activity.   Somehow I managed to overlook the fact that it was basically dar...

History and geography often seem to be unfair to the siblings of the famous.  Einstein may have had a brilliant older sister for all I know, Bob Dylan’s younger brother may have been gifted in ways that will remain forever hidden.  The bright flame of fame does not always illuminate those who stand close to the source of the light; rather it can cast a darker shadow.   Uluru does this to it’s geological sibling Kata Tjuta – it draws all the attention away and casts a very long shadow.  But if you look away from the light, you see something even more remarkable.  Uluru is an icon – like Sydney Harbour Bridge and the kangaroo  - bound to the world vision of Australia through repetition and the failure of advertisers’ imagination.  You can’t sum up a country, much less a continent, in just a few objects.  There is always something else to find, something else that tells a different story. I don’t know when I lear...