A photo of me from my late 50s. Not so good now



Events of 2022 as recalled in January, 2023

2022 had lots of big political news but for me it also had big personal news. I actually fell in love! How's that for a man in his 80th year?

My partner Zoe originates from Serbia and is in her 70s. Below is my most recent picture of her



Another good picture:



Zoe and I met at the very beginning of 2022 and are still going strong into 2023. But if and when the romance ends, 2022 will still be a memorable year for me. It is of course particuarly rare and difficult for really old people to form new relationships. Large numbers of elderly people die alone. Zoe was referring to that difficulty recently when she put her arm around me and said: "John, we have one big thing in common: Nobody else wants us". She had a point.

It was not love at first sight but we did like one-another from the beginning and that soon deepened. The biggest surprise is that she and I are about as incompatible as it gets. I fail to understand her strong European accent a lot of the time and I am as unfit as she is super-fit. She jogs for miles every day and I walk only short distances. She is still pretty good-looking for her age while my looks break cameras these days. And that's just the start of our differences.

So compatibility is not all it's cracked up to be!

So what works between us? Hard to say definitively but I think it begins with us liking one-another. And we are both around top of the IQ range. She once said: "I used to go for handsome men but they are all stupid!"

I think the main influence that keeps us together is a principle I have always followed: If you find two good things in another person all the rest can be negotiated or adapted to. And the two things I particularly look for in women are a high IQ and a liking for classical music.

And my little Serb has both of those two rare qualities. She is even strongly moved by the music of J.S. Bach. That latter would mean nothing to most people but it is huge to me as I feel the same way about Bach. Mine are minority tastes but as an academic I am stuck with them.

We are also both high-functioning autistics so understand one-another's autistic behaviours when they emerge. The fellowship of the autistics is an unlikely concept but something like that does seem to work for Zoe and me at times. And aging does mellow one. At my age I have nothing to prove and no need to achieve. So I can just sit back and just enjoy a relationship for what it is.

Zoe also has a good sense of humor and a liking for kisses and cuddles. She often falls asleep in my arms and I like that.



Christmas 2022

On Christmas day, we just lay in bed talking for most of the time together -- with her doing most of the talking, as usual. She spent some time talking about Trajan, which is a pretty intellectual topic. I am myself interested in Roman history so I knew what she was talking about. She has a lot of intellectual interests -- principally in ancient history, European literature and clinical psychology, so, as I have noted previously We have shared high culture interests and that pleases both of us. When Zoe wanted to mock me as being idle (I am) she quite appositely referred to me as being an Oblomov, which is an allusion to a classic 19th century Russian novel.



Christmas eve

I have in the past often abandoned my pagan ways long enough to go to church on Christmas day. I did not do that in 2022 but I did go to a service on the preceding Saturday (24th) at a Seventh Day Adventist church. Adventist beliefs seem generally well founded in scripture so I enjoy an SDA service as much as the Presbyterian services I was brought up to.

On this occasion, Zoe wanted to go to a specific SDA church where some people are of Serbian origin, including the Pastor. She hoped to speak her native language with someone. I was happy to accompany her.

She has great difficulties with punctuality so I was doubtful that she would get to my place on time for us to get to the service at at 11am. But she did. She drove and got us to the church exactly at at 11am.

I thought the sermon was reasonable and I enjoyed belting out the traditional Christmas hymns. In the sermon, the preachrer outlined the pagan origins of Christmas but said that it was still a good time to celebrate the birth of Christ. I thought that was good theology. It was only the second SDA service I had been to and I noted something that had surprised me previously: No Bible readings. Very unusual in a Protestant service. Zoe did afterwards get her wish to speak in Serbian with the pastor



Food

Zoe has very strict food ideas, which we follow whenever we are at home together. She believes in eating only uncooked fruit and vegetables. There is some evidence that such a diet is good for you so I don't mind having that for a few of my meals

And Zoe does have her own preparation ideas for food. She does not cook but she likes to grate most of her food. That certainly helps a big lot of fruit and veg to go down. So she is a dab hand at rapidly grating lots of food. She was however getting a bit tired of all the grating so in November bought herself an electric grating machine. It's a bit like a juicer where you eat the pulp instead of throwing it away. Greenies would approve!

She brought the machine over to my place as she got it from the shop and proceeded to set it up for the first time. She recently did that with another machine she bought. She must feel that I can give her at least moral support if she has trouble putting a machine together. She does however have a degree in mechanical engineering from the university of Belgrade so does not seek my help initially. As it happens, the new machine was a bit of a puzzle to set up so I did make a suggestion that she found helpful.

Anyway, below is the initial dinner she put in front of me with output from her new machine.



It features grated parsnip. grated beetroot, grated carrot, chopped onion, chopped spinach, and chopped avocado. She chopped the onion in her machine too. It has a variety of cutters


The machine



"Down the coast"

Going "down the coast" is a frequent activity among Brisbane people. It refers to the drive of over an hour to get to the surf beaches to the South of Brisbane -- Surfer's Paradise etc.

I used to make that trip in my early 20s with some frequency but it is now around 50 years since that time. I am not an outdoorsy type.

But it was was Zoe's birthday and she wanted to go "down the coast" for it. So we went. She lived down there a few years ago so knows the area to some extent. She particularly wanted to go to the Q1 building, the tallest one there. She luckily got a parking spot just outside the building and I paid the $58 to get us to the observation deck on the 77th floor of it. Views don't come cheap.



But the views were indeed striking and the coffee and Tiramisu we had while we were there went down well.


The birthday girl on top of the world


Some scenery. Ignore the spotty guy in the corner

Some very good scenery

Zoe has very strict Vegan dietary views so the cake was a concession for her. Rather than doing any more dining at the restaurant she provided a picnic lunch for us, which we had in a shelter overlooking the water. It was very good and tasty, based on fruit and vegetables. She makes an exceptional apple crumble, which has long been a favourite dessert for me.

I paid over $100 to fill her petrol tank for the trip "down the coast" so that was rather striking to me too. It inspired the thought that people who go on motoring trips, particularly with mobile homes, have to have considerable funds for it. It is not a cheap holiday now.

On the drive home Zoe gave me an extended lecture in moral philosophy. She likes Erich Fromm's rejection of relativism. I said nothing in response but I was familiar with her topic. I have had a few academic articles on the topic published. See here

Zoe adheres to the idea of moral absolutes, which is perhaps the most frequently held view of the matter. Analytical philosophers normally regard such views as naive and I once did too. I have had second thoughts on it in more recent years however and conclude that there is indeed an objective referent that people have in mind when they use such language. See here



A remarkable day in July

There are three Serbian Orthodox churches in Brisbane and all 3 have a substantial following. Zoe is not a member of any of them and is not sympathetic to church doctrine. But they are a great gathering point for Brisbane Serbs and for that reason Zoe sometimes visits them. She likes to speak and hear spoken her mother tongue.

So she became aware that the Wacol church was having a BBQ lunch --to be accompanied by folk dancing and Serbian music. And two friends of hers -- Ana and Robert -- were going to be there and asked Zoe to join them. Zoe wanted me to accompany her so she came to my place first and then I drove us out to the church under directions from her.


Zoe dressed for the occasion

I was stunned. It was an enormous gathering. No Brisbane Protestant church could muster one tenth of the people at the Serbian church. There really were people everywhere.

For food I ordered raznici and Zoe ordered some sort of soup. When I lived in Sydney years ago I used to have raznici fairly often so it was with some regret that I found no restaurant in Brisbane that sold them. So today was a rare opportiunity. And they were very good. I was pleased to re-acquaint myself with them. Serbs usually make raznici with marinated pork so I assume that is what I had. They consisted of large lumps of meat barbecued on skewers and served with bread and cut-up raw onion. I would have liked some of the traditional kaimak with them but that did not seem to be on offer

A great feature of the gathering was the many beautiful folk costumes being worn by many of the women and children. They made a very colourful display during the folk dancing. The dances were very complex but performed with great precision -- rather like square-dancing without the caller



A "kolo" dance above, a dance in a circle. In Serbian kolo means a circle

When we left the BBQ after an hour or so I drove us to Zoe's house at Redbank Plains. I had not seen it before. It was a large brick house on a slab in a large yard and with a park over the road. So it was well situated. It was very crowded with Zoe's multitudinous possessions -- mostly books, CDs and DVDs

Video of one of the dances:





My birthday in July

At her usual eccentric hour of 4pm Zoe came over for lunch. She brought with her one of her impromptu pies featuring egg, potato and much else. It was both tasty and filling. She is a good cook

And her talents are not limited to cookery. She must be the most intellectual lady I have met. Our conversation after lunch was wide-ranging. She started out telling me something about Stefan Zweig's biography of Rilke. As it happens I had in fact read some of the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke -- in the original German -- but I doubt if I will ever meet another lady who would know of him. Zoe went on to mention William Faulkner, Rudolf Steiner, the pineal gland and Solzhenitsyn's last book. And she is always talking about history. And we have both read most of the major works of Russian literature. It was very pleasing to me to have a conversation with her at such a high cultural level. Definitely a good birthday present.

The present she bought me was a large solar-powered lamp. We are both rather into lamps

We already by that time had a very affectionate relationship and the birthday card she gave me reflects that





Living with Zoe

By the skin of her teeth Zoe managed to bypass the floods of early March and got over to my place via Ipswich Rd. But she could not get back. So she stayed with me until 4 days later. And even then it took her 2 hours to get home via various detours.

So we were suddenly living together for 4 days, something unforeseen by us both. We did have some frictions but we also had a lot of laughs so it all went reasonably well. She went home in a high mood.

While she was here, she had a field day bullying me into eating raw food (fruit and salads) for my meals. I didn't give in entirely however. I had sausage rolls from time to time to meet my need for junk food.

Being confined by the floods she didn't have much to do for a lot of the time so she unleashed a cleaning blitz on my place. Some places got cleaned that had not been cleaned for years, given my bachelor habits. She even cleaned my assortment of power boards



Some amusing bits

Zoe is a high-functioning autistic so lacks complete social sensitivity -- as I do. So we both at times say things that upset people without meaning to do so. What seems to us a simple statement of fact can sometimes be seen by others as derogatory. So it amuses me to mention three of the apparently derogatory things that Zoe has said to me over the last year. Here goes:

"You are cold like a snake"

"You remind me of my dog but my dog was better"

"You have skin like a toad"

You can't go much lower than that can you? But it was all innocent. In the first case she had just kissed me and was referring to the effect of the airconditioning blowing on my face. In the second she was trimming my beard and it reminded her of the trimming she used to do on the hair of her deceased dog, which she misses. In the third case she was referring to the rough skin on my arm that had resulted from my many encounters with skin cancer. She is in fact favourably disposed toward amphibians



A bonus picture of her

I thought she looked very chic in the recent photo below:





Some personal links:

Some of my geneology

Some chronology

An index to a series of short notes about events and observations in my life from the late 1990s on

My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal); My Home page supplement; My Alternative Wikipedia; My Blogroll; Menu of my longer writings; Subject index to my short notes. My annual picture page is here; My Recipes;

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