In bed with Phillip

 

Nothing is very much alive at "Riverbend" after 10 p.m. except ABC Radio National's 'Late Night Live'. Tucked up in bed, with the radio dial softly glowing, I am tuned into Phillip Adams' Late Night Live.

I've been a regular listener of LNL for more than twenty years, going back to its previous presenter, the redoubtable Richard Ackland, and as soon as I hear its theme music, the first movement of Brescianello's violin concerto no. 4 in e-minor, I know I'm in for an intellectual treat.

There's no other radio program anywhere on Earth that casts a wider net, so go ahead and spend a night in bed with Phillip.

 

So weit die Füße tragen

 

 

As prisoner of war, Clemens Forell, a German soldier during WW II, was sentenced to 25 years in a labour camp in far east Siberia. After four years working in the mines he escapes from the camp (in 1949) and tries to get home to his wife and children.

For three years he journeys through Siberia. An odyssey of 14,000 kilometers, set against a backdrop of desolate and inhospitable landscape, beset by danger (from both animals and humans). Constantly battling the worst nature can throw at him, Forell makes his way, step by step, towards Persia and the longed-for freedom. Sometimes riding on trains, sometimes by boat, mostly on foot, he never knows if his next step won't be his last. His prosecutor Kamenev is always right behind him, and more than once it seems that Forell is captured again ...

 

You can read the book online by clicking here
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This film, first made as a TV-series in black-and-white in six parts of altogether 400 minutes in 1959, and remade in 2001 as a feature film in colour in both the German and Russian language, is based on the book by Josef Martin Bauer which has been translated into fifteen languages.

It is the true story of the German officer Cornelius Rost (1922-1983) who in 1949 escaped from the Siberian Gulag and for three years travelled 14,000 km, mainly on foot, to present-day Iran. After his return to Germany, Rost lived for the next 30 years in constant fear of being re-arrested by the KGB and died a broken man.

And yet, he was lucky to have come back at all! Of the 3.5 million German prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union, the vast majority perished in the forced labour camps.

 

It's a STIHL

$369 skin only, $549 for whole kit; female operator optional

 

I've had a troubled relationship with the infernal combustion engine ever since my first car, a tiny, second-hand FIAT 500, which I kept paying off well after it had broken down after only six months. It taught me a lesson and I never had another car until I got my first company car at the age of twenty-four, a huge 4x4 TOYOTA Landcruiser painted in safety-yellow and bearing the insignia of the Bechtel-WKE construction project on Bougainville in Papua New Guinea.

After that came a succession of other company cars in New Guinea, in Burma, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and Greece, to the point that I never had to bother about repairs, oil and grease changes, flat tyres, or even filling up with petrol - they were all part of my remuneration.

Fast forward to retirement and I found myself surrounded by a diesel engine in my tractor, a 4-stroke (whatever that means) in my ride-on mower, and several two-stroke lawnmowers which would only start after I had almost dislocated my shoulder and which are gathering dust now, thanks to the German company STIHL and its battery-powered tools.

Many months ago, I bought a battery-powered lawnmover which is a joy to use as it never fails to start, to which I recently added a battery-powered hedge-trimmer which I have already used to great effect on every hedge at "Riverbend", and I'm about to also buy the above battery-powered grass-trimmer which at $369 is an absolute STIHL.